down at all, and never had been.
It was hard up all the time. He remembered, now that it was too late,
that the mate had always steered hitherto with a tiller; that a wheel
turns exactly the opposite way to the tiller; and that with every
sail hauled tight, and the helm held hard over, the loyal little craft
had been as literally murdered as if she had been torpedoed, and also
their lives jeopardized through this man's folly. What was the good of
him even now? There he lay like a log, as dumb as the man whom he had
left clinging to the taffrail.

"What's to be done now?" he shouted, trying in vain to rouse the
prostrate figure with his foot. "Rouse up! Rouse up, you fool!" he
roared. "Are you going to die like a coward?" And letting himself
down, he put his face close to that of the man who by his stupidity
had brought them all to this terrible plight. But both the mate and
boy seemed paralyzed. Not a word, not a moan could he get out of them.
The help which they would have been was denied him. Once more he
realized that if any one was to be saved, he and he alone must
accomplish it. A momentary rest between two waves decided him. There
was one half-second of trying to get his balance as he stood up, then
came the plunge into the wild abyss, and he found himself floundering
in the belly of the sail, struggling to keep his footing, but up to
his waist in water. With a fierce sense of triumph that he was safely
past the first danger, the yawning gulf between the rail and boom, he
threw every grain of his remaining strength into the desperate task
before him, and pushed out for the gaff that was lying on the surface
of the sea, thirty feet away in the darkness. Even as he started a
surging wave washed him off his feet, and again he found himself
hopelessly wallowing in the water, but still in the great cauldron
formed by the canvas.

How any human being could walk even the length of the sail under such
circumstances he does not know any more than I do. But the impossible
was accomplished, and somehow he was clinging at last like a limpet to
the very end of the gaff, his legs already dangling over the fatal
edge, and with nothing to keep him from the clutch of death beyond it
but his grip of the floating spar. To this he must cling until the
mocking boat should again come taut on the line and possibly run
within his reach. The next second out of the darkness what seemed to
the man in the sail a mountain of blackness rush