s, I sprang to the topsails, and before the
wind had become too strong we had them fairly set and were coiling down.
Then I went aft for orders.

Wolf Larsen nodded approval and relinquished the wheel to me. The wind
was strengthening steadily and the sea rising. For an hour I steered,
each moment becoming more difficult. I had not the experience to steer
at the gait we were going on a quartering course.

"Now take a run up with the glasses and raise some of the boats. We've
made at least ten knots, and we're going twelve or thirteen now. The old
girl knows how to walk."

I contested myself with the fore crosstrees, some seventy feet above the
deck. As I searched the vacant stretch of water before me, I
comprehended thoroughly the need for haste if we were to recover any of
our men. Indeed, as I gazed at the heavy sea through which we were
running, I doubted that there was a boat afloat. It did not seem
possible that such frail craft could survive such stress of wind and
water.

I could not feel the full force of the wind, for we were running with it;
but from my lofty perch I looked down as though outside the _Ghost_ and
apart from her, and saw the shape of her outlined sharply against the
foaming sea as she tore along instinct with life. Sometimes she would
lift and send across some great wave, burying her starboard-rail from
view, and covering her deck to the hatches with the boiling ocean. At
such moments, starting from a windward roll, I would go flying through
the air with dizzying swiftness, as though I clung to the end of a huge,
inverted pendulum, the arc of which, between the greater rolls, must have
been seventy feet or more. Once, the terror of this giddy sweep
overpowered me, and for a while I clung on, hand and foot, weak and
trembling, unable to search the sea for the missing boats or to behold
aught of the sea but that which roared beneath and strove to overwhelm
the _Ghost_.

But the thought of the men in the midst of it steadied me, and in my
quest for them I forgot myself. For an hour I saw nothing but the naked,
desolate sea. And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight struck the
ocean and turned its surface to wrathful silver, I caught a small black
speck thrust skyward for an instant and swallowed up. I waited
patiently. Again the tiny point of black projected itself through the
wrathful blaze a couple of points off our port-bow. I did not attempt to
shout, but communicated th