selves forgiven the immediate author of their miseries, sounded like an absolution.
Tea was taken on deck in the time of the sunset, and not long after the five castaways—castaways once more—lay down to sleep.
Day dawned windless and hot. Their slumbers had been too profound to be refreshing, and they woke listless, and sat up, and stared about them with dull eyes. Only Wicks, smelling a hard day's work ahead, was more alert. He went first to the well, sounded it once and then a second time, and stood awhile with a grim look, so that all could see he was dissatisfied. Then he shook himself, stripped to the buff, clambered on the rail, drew himself up and raised his arms to plunge. The dive was never taken. He stood instead transfixed, his eyes on the horizon.
“Hand up that glass,” he said.
In a trice they were all swarming aloft, the nude captain leading with the glass.
On the northern horizon was a finger of grey smoke, straight in the windless air like a point of admiration.
“What do you make it?” they asked of Wicks.
“She's truck down,” he replied; “no telling yet. By the way the smoke builds, she must be heading right here.”
“What can she be?”
“She might be a China mail,” returned Wicks, “and she might be a blooming man-of-war, come to look for castaways. Here! This ain't the time to stand staring. On deck, boys!”
He was the first on deck, as he had been the first aloft, handed down the ensign, bent it again to the signal halliards, and ran it up union down.
“Now hear me,” he said, jumping into his trousers, “and everything I say you grip on to. If that's a man-of-war, she'll be in a tearing hurry; all these
