runken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too,
were drunk."

"Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,"
I laughed.

"Quite so," he said. "You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You
have no facts in your pocketbook."

"Yet we spend as freely as you," was Maud Brewster's contribution.

"More freely, because it costs you nothing."

"And because we draw upon eternity," she retorted.

"Whether you do or think you do, it's the same thing. You spend what you
haven't got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you
haven't got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have
sweated to get."

"Why don't you change the basis of your coinage, then?" she queried
teasingly.

He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully:
"Too late. I'd like to, perhaps, but I can't. My pocketbook is stuffed
with the old coinage, and it's a stubborn thing. I can never bring
myself to recognize anything else as valid."

He ceased speaking, and his gaze wandered absently past her and became
lost in the placid sea. The old primal melancholy was strong upon him.
He was quivering to it. He had reasoned himself into a spell of the
blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil within him to be
up and stirring. I remembered Charley Furuseth, and knew this man's
sadness as the penalty which the materialist ever pays for his
materialism.

CHAPTER XXV

"You've been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden," Wolf Larsen said, the following
morning at the breakfast-table, "How do things look?"

"Clear enough," I answered, glancing at the sunshine which streamed down
the open companion-way. "Fair westerly breeze, with a promise of
stiffening, if Louis predicts correctly."

He nodded his head in a pleased way. "Any signs of fog?"

"Thick banks in the north and north-west."

He nodded his head again, evincing even greater satisfaction than before.

"What of the _Macedonia_?"

"Not sighted," I answered.

I could have sworn his face fell at the intelligence, but why he should
be disappointed I could not conceive.

I was soon to learn. "Smoke ho!" came the hail from on deck, and his
face brightened.

"Good!" he exclaimed, and left the table at once to go on deck and into
the steerage, where the hunters were taking the first breakfast of their
exile.

Maud Brewster and I scarcely touched the food before us, gazing, instead,
in silent anxiet