of a leaky balloon."

Coulter looked me over for a moment and replied with absolute composure.

"Mr. Deprayne, rights are good things--when you can enforce them.
Consulates and courts of admiralty are a long way off. The intervening
water is quite deep. If you don't like the _Wastrel_, leave it. I'm
sorry I can't spare you a boat to leave in."

Mansfield and myself went that night in the miserable cabin which we
shared oppressed with the conviction that the breaking point was at
hand. Mansfield had suddenly sloughed off his boyishness and become
unexpectedly self-contained, giving the impression of capability. The
prospect of action had changed him. Once more he began to quote his
ghastly verses, but now without shuddering, almost cheerfully.

"''Twas a cutlass swipe or an ounce of lead,
Or a yawning hole in a battered head--
And the scuppers glut with a rotting red.'"

Then he remembered that sometimes men survive strange adventures, and he
wrote a letter to the girl in Sussex which he asked me to deliver in the
event that I, and not he, should prove such a survivor. I fastened it
with a pin into the pocket of my pajama jacket. For hours after we had
turned into our berths each of us knew that the other was not sleeping.
We heard the crazy droning of the sick engine; the wash of the quiet
water; the straining of the timbers.

We had not, on turning in, followed our usual custom of blowing out the
vile-smelling oil lamp which gave our stateroom its only illumination.
Neither of us had spoken of it, but we left the light burning probably
in tacit presentiment that this was to be a night of some portentous
development, and one not to be spent in darkness. Mansfield pretended to
sleep in the upper berth, but after vainly courting dreams for an hour,
I slipped out of mine and crept to the fresher air of the deck.

When I returned to the cabin, still obsessed with restless wakefulness,
I found the diary, and throwing myself into my bunk, spent still another
hour in its perusal. I had long ago laid by my early scruples and now I
found in its pages a quality strangely soothing.

Singularly enough, in all our fragmentary reading between these limp
covers, we had never pursued any consecutive course and though certain
passages had been re-read until I fancy both of us could have quoted
them from memory, there still remained others upon which we had not
touched. For me in my present condition of jumping nerve