wheel, Mr. Van Weyden, keep
this course for the present, and you might as well set the watches, for
we won't do any lingering to-night."

"I'd give five hundred dollars, though," he added, "just to be aboard the
_Macedonia_ for five minutes, listening to my brother curse."

"And now, Mr. Van Weyden," he said to me when he had been relieved from
the wheel, "we must make these new-comers welcome. Serve out plenty of
whisky to the hunters and see that a few bottles slip for'ard. I'll
wager every man Jack of them is over the side to-morrow, hunting for Wolf
Larsen as contentedly as ever they hunted for Death Larsen."

"But won't they escape as Wainwright did?" I asked.

He laughed shrewdly. "Not as long as our old hunters have anything to
say about it. I'm dividing amongst them a dollar a skin for all the
skins shot by our new hunters. At least half of their enthusiasm to-day
was due to that. Oh, no, there won't be any escaping if they have
anything to say about it. And now you'd better get for'ard to your
hospital duties. There must be a full ward waiting for you."

CHAPTER XXVI

Wolf Larsen took the distribution of the whisky off my hands, and the
bottles began to make their appearance while I worked over the fresh
batch of wounded men in the forecastle. I had seen whisky drunk, such as
whisky-and-soda by the men of the clubs, but never as these men drank it,
from pannikins and mugs, and from the bottles--great brimming drinks,
each one of which was in itself a debauch. But they did not stop at one
or two. They drank and drank, and ever the bottles slipped forward and
they drank more.

Everybody drank; the wounded drank; Oofty-Oofty, who helped me, drank.
Only Louis refrained, no more than cautiously wetting his lips with the
liquor, though he joined in the revels with an abandon equal to that of
most of them. It was a saturnalia. In loud voices they shouted over the
day's fighting, wrangled about details, or waxed affectionate and made
friends with the men whom they had fought. Prisoners and captors
hiccoughed on one another's shoulders, and swore mighty oaths of respect
and esteem. They wept over the miseries of the past and over the
miseries yet to come under the iron rule of Wolf Larsen. And all cursed
him and told terrible tales of his brutality.

It was a strange and frightful spectacle--the small, bunk-lined space,
the floor and walls leaping and lurching, the dim light, the swaying