s a day and the
music and singing got on the captain's nerves, but he dared not tell
his men what the trouble was. And then one day the oxen drank up the
last of the water. And Lieutenant Smerdrak came and reported the fact.

"Give them rum," said Shard, and he cursed the oxen. "What is good
enough for me," he said, "should be good enough for them," and he
swore that they should have rum.

"Aye, aye, sir," said the young lieutenant of pirates.

Shard should not be judged by the orders he gave that day, for nearly
a fortnight he had watched the doom that was coming slowly towards
him, discipline cut him off from anyone that might have shared his
fear and discussed it, and all the while he had had to navigate his
ship, which even at sea is an arduous responsibility. These things had
fretted the calm of that clear judgment that had once baffled five
navies. Therefore he cursed the oxen and ordered them rum, and
Smerdrak had said "Aye, aye, sir," and gone below.

Towards sunset Shard was standing on the poop, thinking of death; it
would not come to him by thirst; mutiny first, he thought. The oxen
were refusing rum for the last time, and the men were beginning to eye
Captain Shard in a very ominous way, not muttering, but each man
looking at him with a sidelong look of the eye as though there were
only one thought among them all that had no need of words. A score of
geese like a long letter "V" were crossing the evening sky, they
slanted their necks and all went twisting downwards somewhere about
the horizon. Captain Shard rushed to his chart-room, and presently the
men came in at the door with Old Frank in front looking awkward and
twisting his cap in his hand.

"What is it?" said Shard as though nothing were wrong.

Then Old Frank said what he had come to say: "We want to know what you
be going to do."

And the men nodded grimly.

"Get water for the oxen," said Captain Shard, "as the swine won't have
rum, and they'll have to work for it, the lazy beasts. Up anchor!"

And at the word water a look came into their faces like when some
wanderer suddenly thinks of home.

"Water!" they said.

"Why not?" said Captain Shard. And none of them ever knew that but for
those geese, that slanted their necks and suddenly twisted downwards,
they would have found no water that night nor ever after, and the
Sahara would have taken them as she has taken so many and shall take
so many more. All that night they followed their ne