and she taking the watches.
Charlie promised that he would answer for the obedience of the men.

Their first concern now was to shape their course for Magdalena Bay.
Moran and Wilbur looked over Kitchell's charts and log-book, but the
girl flung them aside disdainfully.

"He's been sailing by the dead reckoning, and his navigation is drivel.
Why, a cabin-boy would know better; and, to end with, the chronometer
is run down. I'll have to get Green'ich time by taking the altitude of
a star to-night, and figure out our longitude. Did you bring off our
sextant?"

Wilbur shook his head. "Only the papers," he said.

"There's only an old ebony quadrant here," said Moran, "but it will have
to do."

That night, lying flat on her back on the deck with a quadrant to her
eye, she "got a star and brought it down to the horizon," and sat up
under the reeking lamp in the cabin nearly the whole night ciphering and
ciphering till she had filled up the four sides of the log-slate with
her calculations. However, by daylight she had obtained the correct
Greenwich time and worked the schooner's longitude.

Two days passed, then a third. Moran set the schooner's course. She kept
almost entirely to herself, and when not at the wheel or taking the sun
or writing up the log, gloomed over the after-rail into the schooner's
wake. Wilbur knew not what to think of her. Never in his life had he
met with any girl like this. So accustomed had she been to the rough,
give-and-take, direct associations of a seafaring life that she
misinterpreted well-meant politeness--the only respect he knew how
to pay her--to mean insidious advances. She was suspicious of
him--distrusted him utterly, and openly ridiculed his abortive
seamanship. Pretty she was not, but she soon began to have a certain
amount of attraction for Wilbur. He liked her splendid ropes of hair,
her heavy contralto voice, her fine animal strength of bone and muscle
(admittedly greater than his own); he admired her indomitable courage
and self-reliance, while her positive genius in the matters of
seamanship and navigation filled him with speechless wonder. The girls
he had been used to were clever only in their knowledge of the amenities
of an afternoon call or the formalities of a paper german. A girl of
two-and-twenty who could calculate longitude from the altitude of a
star was outside his experience. The more he saw of her the more he
knew himself to have been right in his first estim