r hour, the sultry oppressiveness steadily increasing and the
stark calm still continuing, the barometer had fallen to 29.70. The
mate, being young, lacked the patience of waiting for the portentous. He
ceased his restless pacing, and waved his arms.

"If she's going to come let her come!" he cried. "There's no use
shilly-shallying this way! Whatever the worst is, let us know it and
have it! A pretty pickle--lost with a crazy chronometer and a hurricane
that won't blow!"

The cloud-mussed sky turned to a vague copper colour, and seemed to
glow as the inside of a huge heated caldron. Nobody remained below. The
native sailors formed in anxious groups amidships and for'ard, where
they talked in low voices and gazed apprehensively at the ominous
sky and the equally ominous sea that breathed in long, low, oily
undulations.

"Looks like petroleum mixed with castor oil," the mate grumbled, as he
spat his disgust overside. "My mother used to dose me with messes like
that when I was a kid. Lord, she's getting black!"

The lurid coppery glow had vanished, and the sky thickened and lowered
until the darkness was as that of a late twilight. David Grief, who
well knew the hurricane rules, nevertheless reread the "Laws of Storms,"
screwing his eyes in the faint light in order to see the print. There
was nothing to be done save wait for the wind, so that he might know
how he lay in relation to the fast-flying and deadly centre that from
somewhere was approaching out of the gloom.

It was three in the afternoon, and the glass had sunk to 29:45, when
the wind came. They could see it on the water, darkening the face of the
sea, crisping tiny whitecaps as it rushed along. It was merely a stiff
breeze, and the _Uncle Toby_, filling away under her storm canvas till
the wind was abeam, sloshed along at a four-knot gait.

"No weight to that," Snow sneered. "And after such grand preparation!"

"Pickaninny wind," Jackie-Jackie agreed. "He grow big man pretty quick,
you see."

Grief ordered the foresail put on, retaining the reefs, and the _Uncle
Toby_ mended her pace in the rising breeze. The wind quickly grew to
man's size, but did not stop there. It merely blew hard, and harder, and
kept on blowing harder, advertising each increase by lulls followed by
fierce, freshening gusts. Ever it grew, until the _Uncle Toby's_ rail
was more often pressed under than not, while her waist boiled with
foaming water which the scuppers could not carr