logged her nine knots. Both the captain and
mate worked out the position on a Sumner line, and agreed, and at noon
agreed again, and verified the morning sights by the noon sights.

"Another twenty-four hours and we'll be there," Captain Davenport
assured McCoy. "It's a miracle the way the old girl's decks hold out.
But they can't last. They can't last. Look at them smoke, more and
more every day. Yet it was a tight deck to begin with, fresh-calked in
Frisco. I was surprised when the fire first broke out and we battened
down. Look at that!"

He broke off to gaze with dropped jaw at a spiral of smoke that coiled
and twisted in the lee of the mizzenmast twenty feet above the deck.

"Now, how did that get there?" he demanded indignantly.

Beneath it there was no smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from
the wind by the mast, by some freak it took form and visibility at that
height. It writhed away from the mast, and for a moment overhung the
captain like some threatening portent. The next moment the wind whisked
it away, and the captain's jaw returned to place.

"As I was saying, when we first battened down, I was surprised. It was
a tight deck, yet it leaked smoke like a sieve. And we've calked and
calked ever since. There must be tremendous pressure underneath to drive
so much smoke through."

That afternoon the sky became overcast again, and squally, drizzly
weather set in. The wind shifted back and forth between southeast and
northeast, and at midnight the Pyrenees was caught aback by a sharp
squall from the southwest, from which point the wind continued to blow
intermittently.

"We won't make Hao until ten or eleven," Captain Davenport complained
at seven in the morning, when the fleeting promise of the sun had been
erased by hazy cloud masses in the eastern sky. And the next moment he
was plaintively demanding, "And what are the currents doing?"

Lookouts at the mastheads could report no land, and the day passed in
drizzling calms and violent squalls. By nightfall a heavy sea began
to make from the west. The barometer had fallen to 29.50. There was no
wind, and still the ominous sea continued to increase. Soon the
Pyrenees was rolling madly in the huge waves that marched in an unending
procession from out of the darkness of the west. Sail was shortened as
fast as both watches could work, and, when the tired crew had finished,
its grumbling and complaining voices, peculiarly animal-like and
menacing,