y, we struggled through the day. Night came, but neither of us slept.
Day came, and still the wind beat on our faces and the white seas roared
past. By the second night Maud was falling asleep from exhaustion. I
covered her with oilskins and a tarpaulin. She was comparatively dry,
but she was numb with the cold. I feared greatly that she might die in
the night; but day broke, cold and cheerless, with the same clouded sky
and beating wind and roaring seas.

I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours. I was wet and chilled to the
marrow, till I felt more dead than alive. My body was stiff from
exertion as well as from cold, and my aching muscles gave me the severest
torture whenever I used them, and I used them continually. And all the
time we were being driven off into the north-east, directly away from
Japan and toward bleak Bering Sea.

And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated. In
fact, toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle and
something more. The boat's bow plunged under a crest, and we came
through quarter-full of water. I bailed like a madman. The liability of
shipping another such sea was enormously increased by the water that
weighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy. And another such
sea meant the end. When I had the boat empty again I was forced to take
away the tarpaulin which covered Maud, in order that I might lash it down
across the bow. It was well I did, for it covered the boat fully a third
of the way aft, and three times, in the next several hours, it flung off
the bulk of the down-rushing water when the bow shoved under the seas.

Maud's condition was pitiable. She sat crouched in the bottom of the
boat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing the pain she
suffered. But ever her eyes looked bravely at me, and ever her lips
uttered brave words.

The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little I
noticed it. I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-sheets.
The morning of the fourth day found the wind diminished to a gentle
whisper, the sea dying down and the sun shining upon us. Oh, the blessed
sun! How we bathed our poor bodies in its delicious warmth, reviving
like bugs and crawling things after a storm. We smiled again, said
amusing things, and waxed optimistic over our situation. Yet it was, if
anything, worse than ever. We were farther from Japan than the night we
left the _Ghost_. Nor co