and
kept mastheaded until twilight of evening, when the _Mary Turner_ was
hove-to, to hold her position through the night. As time went by, and
the scent, according to the Ancient Mariner, grow hotter, all three of
the investors in the adventure came to going aloft. Grimshaw contented
himself with standing on the main crosstrees. Captain Doane climbed even
higher, seating himself on the stump of the foremast with legs a-straddle
of the butt of the fore-topmast. And Simon Nishikanta tore himself away
from his everlasting painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and sky
such as are painted by seminary maidens, to be helped and hoisted up the
ratlines of the mizzen rigging, the huge bulk of him, by two grinning,
slim-waisted sailors, until they lashed him squarely on the crosstrees
and left him to stare with eyes of golden desire, across the sun-washed
sea through the finest pair of unredeemed binoculars that had ever been
pledged in his pawnshops.

"Strange," the Ancient Mariner would mutter, "strange, and most strange.
This is the very place. There can be no mistake. I'd have trusted that
youngster of a third officer anywhere. He was only eighteen, but he
could navigate better than the captain. Didn't he fetch the atoll after
eighteen days in the longboat? No standard compasses, and you know what
a small-boat horizon is, with a big sea, for a sextant. He died, but the
dying course he gave me held good, so that I fetched the atoll the very
next day after I hove his body overboard."

Captain Doane would shrug his shoulders and defiantly meet the
mistrustful eyes of the Armenian Jew.

"It cannot have sunk, surely," the Ancient Mariner would tactfully carry
across the forbidding pause. "The island was no mere shoal or reef. The
Lion's Head was thirty-eight hundred and thirty-five feet. I saw the
captain and the third officer triangulate it."

"I've raked and combed the sea," Captain Doane would then break out, "and
the teeth of my comb are not so wide apart as to let slip through a four-
thousand-foot peak."

"Strange, strange," the Ancient Mariner would next mutter, half to his
cogitating soul, half aloud to the treasure-seekers. Then, with a sudden
brightening, he would add:

"But, of course, the variation has changed, Captain Doane. Have you
allowed for the change in variation for half a century! That should make
a grave difference. Why, as I understand it, who am no navigator, the
variation was n