wls of anger announced the grim
truth--there was not an ounce of food upon the boat.

"Well, thank Gawd it wasn't the water," cried Thompkins. "It's easier
to get along without food than it is without water. We can eat our
shoes if worse comes to worst, but we couldn't drink 'em."

As he spoke Wilson had been boring a hole in one of the water kegs, and
as Spider held a tin cup he tilted the keg to pour a draft of the
precious fluid. A thin stream of blackish, dry particles filtered
slowly through the tiny aperture into the bottom of the cup. With a
groan Wilson dropped the keg, and sat staring at the dry stuff in the
cup, speechless with horror.

"The kegs are filled with gunpowder," said Spider, in a low tone,
turning to those aft. And so it proved when the last had been opened.

"Coal oil and gunpowder!" cried Monsieur Thuran. "SAPRISTI! What a
diet for shipwrecked mariners!"

With the full knowledge that there was neither food nor water on board,
the pangs of hunger and thirst became immediately aggravated, and so on
the first day of their tragic adventure real suffering commenced in
grim earnest, and the full horrors of shipwreck were upon them.

As the days passed conditions became horrible. Aching eyes scanned the
horizon day and night until the weak and weary watchers would sink
exhausted to the bottom of the boat, and there wrest in dream-disturbed
slumber a moment's respite from the horrors of the waking reality.

The sailors, goaded by the remorseless pangs of hunger, had eaten their
leather belts, their shoes, the sweatbands from their caps, although
both Clayton and Monsieur Thuran had done their best to convince them
that these would only add to the suffering they were enduring.

Weak and hopeless, the entire party lay beneath the pitiless tropic
sun, with parched lips and swollen tongues, waiting for the death they
were beginning to crave. The intense suffering of the first few days
had become deadened for the three passengers who had eaten nothing, but
the agony of the sailors was pitiful, as their weak and impoverished
stomachs attempted to cope with the bits of leather with which they had
filled them. Tompkins was the first to succumb. Just a week from the
day the LADY ALICE went down the sailor died horribly in frightful
convulsions.

For hours his contorted and hideous features lay grinning back at those
in the stern of the little boat, until Jane Porter could endure the
sight no