from beneath his pillow the box which contained his half of the precious vase; and I reached for my own piece, and kept it by me while I finished lacing my shoes. Each of us eyed the other suspiciously; and Lutz was quick to follow me when, with my treasure, I mounted to the ship's deck.
"The little boat wallowed there in the trough of the sea, a dead and passive thing. With its heart stilled, it seemed strangely aloof from the wild sounds of the storm and the shrill cries of men—as a clock which has stopped ticking off the time is aloof from the currents of noisy life which flow past it.
"Apparently the crew had gone wild, and the captain, too, had completely lost his head, for we passed him sobbing on the deck, unable to give us a coherent word. The men were fighting like freshmen in a college rush over life-boats which they were attempting to lower to the water.
"'No chance here,' growled Lutz; 'Lord, let’s get out of this mess!'
"I trailed him forward, battling against the wind and the waves which broke over the deck.
"Once I stumbled over a big brute who was on his knees blubbering like a child. I shook him:
"'What did we hit?"
"Reef. She’s a-goin’ down, sir—a-goin’ down. May the good, kind Lord have mercy—’
"Another time I might have pitied this snivelling creature who could not die like a man, but now I stepped over him, intent upon keeping an eye upon Lutz, even as he was intent upon keeping an eye upon me. Lutz was far forward, clinging to a rail, staring over the ship’s side. I reached him, clung with him, and followed his gaze.
"There below us, close against the ship, bobbed a little white dory, looking as frail as an eggshell upon the dim, surging mass of waters; it had been launched probably in the first wild moment, and then abandoned for the heavier, more seaworthy boats.
"'A chance,' spoke Lutz; 'I'll—risk it!"
"He turned to me then, and his eye rested speculatively upon the pocket of my coat which held the vase.
"'No you don’t!' I said sharply. 'I’ll take that risk with you.'
"We stood measuring each other. It was a contest of wills that threatened any moment to degenerate into a physical struggle. "Oh, I see you are thinking it unlikely"— Twining’s long-fingered, nervous, old hand shaded his eyes from the candlelight—"that we two men should have stood there wrestling over a Greek vase when any moment threatened to plunge us into eternity. But if you can not believe that, young man, then you know nothing of the collector’s passion or the scholar’s passion.
"We measured each other, I say—oh, quietly. All about us was-the terror of the storm—the same wash and slap and snarl that you hear now about this very house; and concentrating upon him, probing him, my heart filled with intense hatred of him, slowly and surely, as a jug that is held under a single stream fills with water—such a hatred as threatened to overflow—a killing hatred! There, on just such a night as this, murder was born in me—murder, I tell you!
“The crisis passed. Unexpectedly Lutz gave in:
"'Oh, all right; together still—for a little time—'
"A wave drenched us. We recovered, strained into the darkness to determine whether the little dory had been swamped. But no, she still rode the sea, miraculously right side up.
"'Come along then!' snapped Lutz. 'There's no time to waste.'
"Our time was indeed short. We gathered what store of things we could together, and since the decks of the ship were by this ominously close to the water, the drop into the tossing small dory was eusier than it might have been. Lutz took the oars. Some way he had maneuvered us about the bow of the ship, and now we were clear of the sinking vessel, carried swiftly away from it by the sea.
"The rest is a blur. I recall dark shapes—bits of bobbing wreckage—and the white circle of an empty life saver. I did not see the ship go down. One minute there were lights; and the next minute there was darkness over all the ocean, and the human voices had subsided into the voices of wind and water. For the sea itself claimed all my attention, and held it.
"That night was a business of separate, marching waves, with a separate prayer for each wave, that it would not break at the wrong moment. A hundred times I shut my eyes and abandoned hope, and a hundred times I opened them and found us safe. Lutz, an athlete in his day, hung onto the oars, but he was powerless against that surge of water. It was only a miracle which kept us afloat, Our little dory rode the waves like a cork. but still she rode them.
"With the breaking of a sullen dawn, the wind died. The rain settled to a steady downpour, and the waves, as the day wore on, subsided to the long, low rollers that last for hours after such a gale. The gray sea was a vast, unbroken stretch without a trace of life; perhaps the miracle that had saved our frail boat had not held for those heavier dories . . .
"Anyway, to cut it short, we drifted that day without sight of a single vessel. Wet through and numb with cold, I was glad to take a shift at the oars while Lutz slept. Our hastily gathered provisions were found to consist of half a pail of soda biscuits, a lantern without oil, some miscellaneous ropes and tarpaulins—and that was all!
"We ate sparingly of the biscuits, drank rain water caught in the cracker pail. Our boat, we discovered, was leaking badly through seams in the bow; so we crowded as much weight to the stern of the craft as we could, and I was kept busy bailing out the water.
"Late in the afternoon, when the situation looked worst, we perceived a black speck upon the horizon. The speck grew into a pile of dark rocks—bare and uninhabited, we saw, as the current carried us close. Somehow, we gained the sheltered side of the island, and there, in a narrow inlet, achieved a landing. The mass of rocks was perhaps fourteen hundred feet long and half as wide. It rose abruptly from the sea, a lonely, desolate pile. The only life was sea gulls, insects and spiders, and a few fish in the surrounding waters. We were together there on the island for four days.
"Through all those four days, half-starved and suffering from exposure as we were, Lutz and I nursed each his own half of the cylix and kept a watchful eye upon the other half. The strain of the situation grew intolerable. Now through what follows I don’t know how to account for myself; whether it was a fever working in my blood—but no, I was coldly, calculatingly sane as I laid my plans. Yet before that crisis I had never in my life been a vicious man.
“You see, figuring our location from the ship’s map as near as I could remember it, I came to believe that this solitary rock was one visited and described by Darwin in his investigation of volcanic islands. If it was the island I believed it to be, then it lay off the ocean lines and was very rarely passed by ships. Our chance of being rescued, if we stayed on the island then, was slight.
"I did not mention these deductions to Lutz. Nor, after Lutz had eaten our last cracker, did I tell him of my own small reserve supply of concentrated meat, which I carried always in my pocket at that time to save the trouble of too frequent meals. At first I did not myself comprehend the drift of my own thoughts.
