hem? Well, I don't know, there's
no accountin'."

He hung in irons. So she had been keeping company with the sea cows--and
she talked of them as "friends."

Now Raft, for all his limitless power of compassion for a female in
distress would have slaughtered those same "sea-cows" to the last bull,
and without a shred of compunction or compassion, had he possessed
kettles to boil down the blubber and a vessel to carry the oil. He had
already done in two of the babies for food when she was not looking. The
idea of talking about them as friends tickled his mind in a new place.
Then, as he glanced at the great bulls taking headers in the sunset
light and snorting in from the sea and squatting over the beach, he came
as near as anything to bursting into a roar of laughter.

Then he suddenly remembered supper and went off to prepare it.

The girl, left to herself, smiled. He had given her back that power and,
like the sea elephants when they repulsed the penguins, he had given her
something to smile over. She saw that he could not understand her in the
least in a lot of little things, whilst she understood him through and
through--or so she thought. She had thought the same about the sea
elephants till the great battle, and--she had never seen Raft with
murder in his eyes making the elements of beef tea.

He had made a stew for supper out of mussels, canned vegetables, seal
meat and a piece of rabbit and when supper was over she went to bed in
the bed he had made for her, for he had stripped the cache of all its
wearing apparel and the remaining blankets, reserving the blankets for
her use.

Then as she lay awake before dropping off to sleep she heard a sudden
burst of noise from the night outside. It sounded as though one of the
bulls had suddenly perceived a joke and were giving vent to his
feelings.

She knew what it was, and she guessed the joke, and then, lying there in
the dark, she began to laugh softly to herself with laughter that seemed
to ease her mind of some old incubus clinging to it--less laughter than
a sort of inverted form of crying and ending up almost in the latter
with a few sniffs.

Then she fell asleep and dreamed that Raft had turned into something
that seemed like a sea lion. She had never seen a sea lion, but this
dream--one looked something like a lion and something like a sea
elephant and something like Raft--with a touch of a carthorse. It had
flippers, then it had wings, and the setting w