steering and eating morsels between puffs.

By the time it was dark, wind and sea had become too strong for the boat,
and I reluctantly took in the sail and set about making a drag or
sea-anchor. I had learned of the device from the talk of the hunters,
and it was a simple thing to manufacture. Furling the sail and lashing
it securely about the mast, boom, sprit, and two pairs of spare oars, I
threw it overboard. A line connected it with the bow, and as it floated
low in the water, practically unexposed to the wind, it drifted less
rapidly than the boat. In consequence it held the boat bow on to the sea
and wind--the safest position in which to escape being swamped when the
sea is breaking into whitecaps.

"And now?" Maud asked cheerfully, when the task was accomplished and I
pulled on my mittens.

"And now we are no longer travelling toward Japan," I answered. "Our
drift is to the south-east, or south-south-east, at the rate of at least
two miles an hour."

"That will be only twenty-four miles," she urged, "if the wind remains
high all night."

"Yes, and only one hundred and forty miles if it continues for three days
and nights."

"But it won't continue," she said with easy confidence. "It will turn
around and blow fair."

"The sea is the great faithless one."

"But the wind!" she retorted. "I have heard you grow eloquent over the
brave trade-wind."

"I wish I had thought to bring Wolf Larsen's chronometer and sextant," I
said, still gloomily. "Sailing one direction, drifting another
direction, to say nothing of the set of the current in some third
direction, makes a resultant which dead reckoning can never calculate.
Before long we won't know where we are by five hundred miles."

Then I begged her pardon and promised I should not be disheartened any
more. At her solicitation I let her take the watch till midnight,--it
was then nine o'clock, but I wrapped her in blankets and put an oilskin
about her before I lay down. I slept only cat-naps. The boat was
leaping and pounding as it fell over the crests, I could hear the seas
rushing past, and spray was continually being thrown aboard. And still,
it was not a bad night, I mused--nothing to the nights I had been through
on the _Ghost_; nothing, perhaps, to the nights we should go through in
this cockle-shell. Its planking was three-quarters of an inch thick.
Between us and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood.

And yet, I aver it,