insolent face and white mustache, but it was plain the Englishman was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Madden caught himself, stood drawing short breaths through expanded nostrils. “Go to your bunk, Caradoc, and wait till you're sane,” he ordered in fairly even tones, then turned abruptly, leaving the big fellow scowling and biting his choppy mustache.
The navvies turned back to their work, distinctly disappointed; they had expected a fight.
Within the next few days the crew dropped into the routine of derelict life. When the sky cleared and the sea flattened, it left the big dock amid breathless heat beneath a molten tropical sky.
As far as the eye could reach, the castaways saw no signs of life, not a sail, not a smoke, not a gull, not even the ripple of a wave; nothing but gaudy, motionless markings from one flat horizon to the other, dead traceries that swiftly became uninteresting, then monotonous, then disagreeable, then maddening in the aching eyes of the crew.
As much for the mental health of the men as
