L

That night Raft and the girl took it in turns again to keep watch on
deck. They might just as well have gone below for all the trouble the
crew could have given them. These gentry had fought bitterly because
they had been attacked. Raft had frightened them. There is a form of
bravery which one might liken to inverted terror. Rats shew it when they
are cornered, and so do men. They had seen their boss killed with a blow
and the destroyer hurling himself on them and, though they were
peaceable men, they fought. These same peaceable men, be it understood,
would, all the same, have murdered a human being for profit could they
have done so with reasonable safety.

When the girl came on deck in the morning, after her watch below, she
found the deck busy and Raft with his hands in his pockets leaning
against the port bulwarks and watching the busy ones.

"They're in a thundering hurry to get out," said Raft. "That chap,"
pointing to a "chink" that seemed a cut above the others and was
evidently the mate, "has been pointing to the sky and out there beyond
the bay. They seem to smell bad weather coming. I nodded my head to him
and he's working the hands now for all they're worth."

"The wind is blowing from the land," said the girl.

"Yes," said Raft, "it'll take us out without towing, unless it changes."

The hatch cover had been put on and the boat brought to the davits, some
of the crew were up aloft scrambling about like monkeys, others were
making ready to haul on the halyards and a fellow was unlashing the
wheel. There was not a face in all the crowd that did not bear the
signature of Anxiety writ on parchment.

The fear of weather, the fear of Kerguelen, and the fear of that bay,
which was evidently haunted by evil spirits, drove them like a whip.

The mainsail was set to a chorus like the crying of sea fowl and the
foresail and jib. The tide coming in held the barque to a taut anchor
chain with her stern to the beach and the wind ready to take her. The
mate was at the wheel and now from forward ought to have come the sound
of the windlass pawls and the rasp of the rising anchor chain. It
didn't. From the group of Chinese collected there came, instead, a clang
followed by a splash.

"Why, the beggars have knocked the shackle off the chain," cried Raft.
"Lord bless _my_ soul, never waited to raise the mud hook?"

"Does it matter?" she asked.

"Sure to have a spare one," answered he, "but it gets me, that's