ood. Grief, with glaring eyes, greasy and battered,
yelled and cursed them both down and issued commands. Mulhall,
the supercargo, and Hermann were set to work in the cabin at
double-straining and triple-straining the gasoline. A hole was chopped
through the engine room floor, and a Kanaka heaved bilge-water over the
cylinders, while Grief continued to souse running parts in oil.

"Didn't know you were a gasoline expert," Captain Warfield admired when
Grief came into the cabin to catch a breath of little less impure air.

"I bathe in gasoline," he grated savagely through his teeth. "I eat it."

What other uses he might have found for it were never given, for at that
moment all the men in the cabin, as well as the gasoline being strained,
were smashed forward against the bulkhead as the _Malahini_ took an
abrupt, deep dive. For the space of several minutes, unable to gain
their feet, they rolled back and forth and pounded and hammered from
wall to wall. The schooner, swept by three big seas, creaked and groaned
and quivered, and from the weight of water on her decks behaved logily.
Grief crept to the engine, while Captain Warfield waited his chance to
get through the companion-way and out on deck.

It was half an hour before he came back.

"Whaleboat's gone!" he reported. "Galley's gone! Everything gone except
the deck and hatches! And if that engine hadn't been going we'd be gone!
Keep up the good work!"

By midnight the engineer's lungs and head had been sufficiently cleared
of gas fumes to let him relieve Grief, who went on deck to get his own
head and lungs clear. He joined the others, who crouched behind
the cabin, holding on with their hands and made doubly secure by
rope-lashings. It was a complicated huddle, for it was the only place
of refuge for the Kanakas. Some of them had accepted the skipper's
invitation into the cabin but had been driven out by the fumes. The
_Malahini_ was being plunged down and swept frequently, and what they
breathed was air and spray and water commingled.

"Making heavy weather of it, Mulhall!" Grief shouted to his guest
between immersions.

Mulhall, strangling and choking, could only nod. The scuppers could not
carry off the burden of water on the schooner's deck. She rolled it out
and took it in over one rail and the other; and at times, nose thrown
skyward, sitting down on her heel, she avalanched it aft. It surged
along the poop gangways, poured over the top of the cabin, s