s a miracle.

So he came up jauntily, behind Mr. Spokesly, smoking a special
cigarette, and ignoring his chief officer completely until the latter
chose to speak. This was another trick he had learned in the course of
his career of oblique enthusiasms and carefully cultivated antagonisms.
He had once been savagely "attacked," as he called it, by a sailor
simply because he waited for the man to speak before saying a word! He
had found that men might growl at being treated "like dogs" but to rowel
the human soul it was far better to act as though they did not exist at
all. There was a blind primeval ferocity to be engendered by
adumbrating, even for a few moments, their non-existence. And now, with
everything in his favour, for he had heard the engineer's remarks on the
condition of the bilges forward, he was resolved to "maintain his
authority," as he phrased it, by "a perfectly justifiable silence."

But it was no use trying to convince Mr. Spokesly that he did not exist.
That gentleman, in the course of the last few minutes, since the
collision in fact, had experienced a great accession of vitality. He
felt as though not only his own existence but the integrity of the ship
as a living whole, her frame, her life, her freight, and the souls
clinging to her in the blind white void of the fog, was concentrated in
himself. He looked over the side and tried to see if the engineer had
succeeded in getting the pump on that bilge. She was down by the
head--no doubt of that. And yet there couldn't be any real fracture of
that bulkhead, or the fore-hold would have filled by now. Lucky all the
caps were well lashed on the ventilators. He looked over the side again.
The fog seemed clearing a little. And the ship was moving faster. The
beat of the engines was certainly more rapid. He stared at the
ostentatiously turned back of his commander with a sort of exasperated
admiration. He was evidently a much more accomplished scoundrel than Mr.
Spokesly had imagined. Here he had extra speed up his sleeve. Why, it
might be anything up to thirteen knots. Not that the _Kalkis_ had
boilers for that speed. Wow! He was a card!

"I suppose you know the bosun was carried overboard when that ship hit
us," Mr. Spokesly remarked in a conversational tone as the captain
approached in his stroll.

"And I've no doubt," said Captain Rannie with extreme bitterness to the
surrounding air, "that you blame me for not stopping and picking him
up."

"You