o be encountered in
the whole of a lucky season. An angry lot of men, boat-pullers and
steerers as well as hunters, swarmed over our side. Each man felt that
he had been robbed; and the boats were hoisted in amid curses, which, if
curses had power, would have settled Death Larsen for all eternity--"Dead
and damned for a dozen iv eternities," commented Louis, his eyes
twinkling up at me as he rested from hauling taut the lashings of his
boat.

"Listen to them, and find if it is hard to discover the most vital thing
in their souls," said Wolf Larsen. "Faith? and love? and high ideals?
The good? the beautiful? the true?"

"Their innate sense of right has been violated," Maud Brewster said,
joining the conversation.

She was standing a dozen feet away, one hand resting on the main-shrouds
and her body swaying gently to the slight roll of the ship. She had not
raised her voice, and yet I was struck by its clear and bell-like tone.
Ah, it was sweet in my ears! I scarcely dared look at her just then, for
the fear of betraying myself. A boy's cap was perched on her head, and
her hair, light brown and arranged in a loose and fluffy order that
caught the sun, seemed an aureole about the delicate oval of her face.
She was positively bewitching, and, withal, sweetly spirituelle, if not
saintly. All my old-time marvel at life returned to me at sight of this
splendid incarnation of it, and Wolf Larsen's cold explanation of life
and its meaning was truly ridiculous and laughable.

"A sentimentalist," he sneered, "like Mr. Van Weyden. Those men are
cursing because their desires have been outraged. That is all. What
desires? The desires for the good grub and soft beds ashore which a
handsome pay-day brings them--the women and the drink, the gorging and
the beastliness which so truly expresses them, the best that is in them,
their highest aspirations, their ideals, if you please. The exhibition
they make of their feelings is not a touching sight, yet it shows how
deeply they have been touched, how deeply their purses have been touched,
for to lay hands on their purses is to lay hands on their souls."

"'You hardly behave as if your purse had been touched," she said,
smilingly.

"Then it so happens that I am behaving differently, for my purse and my
soul have both been touched. At the current price of skins in the London
market, and based on a fair estimate of what the afternoon's catch would
have been had not the _Mac