all, voicing his wisdom and will to the wisps of creatures who obeyed
and by their brute, puny strength pulled braces, slacked sheets, dragged
courses, swung yards and lowered them, hauled on buntlines and clewlines,
smoothed and gasketed the huge spreads of canvas.

How it happened I know not, but Miss West and I crouched together,
clinging to the rail and to each other in the shelter of the thrumming
weather-cloth. My arm was about her and fast to the railing; her
shoulder pressed close against me, and by one hand she held tightly to
the lapel of my oilskin.

An hour later we made our way across the poop to the chart-house, helping
each other to maintain footing as the _Elsinore_ plunged and bucked in
the rising sea and was pressed over and down by the weight of wind on her
few remaining set sails. The wind, which had lulled after the rain, had
risen in recurrent gusts to storm violence. But all was well with the
gallant ship. The crisis was past, and the ship lived, and we lived, and
with streaming faces and bright eyes we looked at each other and laughed
in the bright light of the chart-room.

"Who can blame one for loving the sea?" Miss West cried out exultantly,
as she wrung the rain from her ropes of hair which had gone adrift in the
turmoil. "And the men of the sea!" she cried. "The masters of the sea!
You saw my father . . . "

"He is a king," I said.

"He is a king," she repeated after me.

And the _Elsinore_ lifted on a cresting sea and flung down on her side,
so that we were thrown together and brought up breathless against the
wall.

I said good-night to her at the foot of the stairs, and as I passed the
open door to the cabin I glanced in. There sat Captain West, whom I had
thought still on deck. His storm-trappings were removed, his sea-boots
replaced by slippers; and he leaned back in the big leather chair, eyes
wide open, beholding visions in the curling smoke of a cigar against a
background of wildly reeling cabin wall.

It was at eleven this morning that the Plate gave us a fiasco. Last
night's was a real pampero--though a mild one. To-day's promised to be a
far worse one, and then laughed at us as a proper cosmic joke. The wind,
during the night, had so eased that by nine in the morning we had all our
topgallant-sails set. By ten we were rolling in a dead calm. By eleven
the stuff began making up ominously in the south'ard.

The overcast sky closed down. Our lofty trucks seem