Enough of this. We're losing time. What is to be done, Mr. McCoy?"

The old man turned his brown eyes, sweet as a woman's, shoreward, and
both captain and mate followed his gaze around from the lonely rock of
Pitcairn to the crew clustering forward and waiting anxiously for the
announcement of a decision. McCoy did not hurry. He thought smoothly and
slowly, step by step, with the certitude of a mind that was never vexed
or outraged by life.

"The wind is light now," he said finally. "There is a heavy current
setting to the westward."

"That's what made us fetch to leeward," the captain interrupted,
desiring to vindicate his seamanship.

"Yes, that is what fetched you to leeward," McCoy went on. "Well, you
can't work up against this current today. And if you did, there is no
beach. Your ship will be a total loss."

He paused, and captain and mate looked despair at each other.

"But I will tell you what you can do. The breeze will freshen tonight
around midnight--see those tails of clouds and that thickness to
windward, beyond the point there? That's where she'll come from, out of
the southeast, hard. It is three hundred miles to Mangareva. Square away
for it. There is a beautiful bed for your ship there."

The mate shook his head.

"Come in to the cabin, and we'll look at the chart," said the captain.

McCoy found a stifling, poisonous atmosphere in the pent cabin. Stray
waftures of invisible gases bit his eyes and made them sting. The deck
was hotter, almost unbearably hot to his bare feet. The sweat poured
out of his body. He looked almost with apprehension about him. This
malignant, internal heat was astounding. It was a marvel that the cabin
did not burst into flames. He had a feeling as if of being in a huge
bake oven where the heat might at any moment increase tremendously and
shrivel him up like a blade of grass.

As he lifted one foot and rubbed the hot sole against the leg of his
trousers, the mate laughed in a savage, snarling fashion.

"The anteroom of hell," he said. "Hell herself is right down there under
your feet."

"It's hot!" McCoy cried involuntarily, mopping his face with a bandana
handkerchief.

"Here's Mangareva," the captain said, bending over the table and
pointing to a black speck in the midst of the white blankness of the
chart. "And here, in between, is another island. Why not run for that?"

McCoy did not look at the chart.

"That's Crescent Island," he answered. "It is uninha