calm, as he crept gingerly up the companionway
with his chronometer cuddled on an even keel to his breast.

Placing it in the custody of a sailor, he returned below and was helped
up with his sea-chest by the steward. In turn, he helped the steward up
with the Ancient Mariner's sea-chest. Next, aided by anxious sailors, he
and Daughtry dropped into the lazarette through the cabin floor, and
began breaking out and passing up a stream of supplies--cases of salmon
and beef, of marmalade and biscuit, of butter and preserved milk, and of
all sorts of the tinned, desiccated, evaporated, and condensed stuff that
of modern times goes down to the sea in ships for the nourishment of men.

Daughtry and the captain emerged last from the cabin, and both stared
upward for a moment at the gaps in the slender, sky-scraping top-hamper,
where, only minutes before, the main- and mizzen-topmasts had been. A
second moment they devoted to the wreckage of the same on deck--the
mizzen-topmast, thrust through the spanker and supported vertically by
the stout canvas, thrashing back and forth with each thrash of the sail,
the main-topmast squarely across the ruined companionway to the steerage.

While the mother-whale expressing her bereavement in terms of violence
and destruction, was withdrawing the necessary distance for another
charge, all hands of the _Mary Turner_ gathered about the starboard boat
swung outboard ready for lowering. A respectable hill of case goods,
water-kegs, and personal dunnage was piled on the deck alongside. A
glance at this, and at the many men of fore and aft, demonstrated that it
was to be a perilously overloaded boat.

"We want the sailors with us, at any rate--they can row," said Simon
Nishikanta.

"But do we want you?" Grimshaw queried gloomily. "You take up too much
room, for your size, and you're a beast anyway."

"I guess I'll be wanted," the pawnbroker observed, as he jerked open his
shirt, tearing out the four buttons in his impetuousness and showing a
Colt's .44 automatic, strapped in its holster against the bare skin of
his side under his left arm, the butt of the weapon most readily
accessible to any hasty dip of his right hand. "I guess I'll be wanted.
But just the same we can dispense with the undesirables."

"If you will have your will," the wheat-farmer conceded sardonically,
although his big hand clenched involuntarily as if throttling a throat.
"Besides, if we should run short of food