poop and the top of the after cabin,
lashing the faces of the two crouching at the wheel behind it.

"It's a sou'easter, I'm almost certain," roared Dan in the girl's ear.
"It will work up to a climax gradually, and then gradually go down, at
this season of the year. Don't be afraid of the water. We can't sink,
I believe; the only danger is that we might break up--and we won't do
that."

But despite the optimism of his words, Dan was not altogether certain
that the wallowing wreck would hold together. There was nothing to do
but wait and see. The situation he grasped in all its grievous
details. He had never been so happy, so utterly at peace as aboard
this derelict. No gilded barge of antiquity had ever been so glorious,
so golden as this mangled wraith of the seas in the sunlit hours of the
immediate past. Her voice, her laughter, had filled them with music,
her presence with all the poetry and romance of the world, and the
light in her eyes shining for him alone had filled him with a great
tenderness.

Now, the night, the storm, danger--death, perhaps. He shut his jaws
and drove the flooding thoughts from his mind. Anger,--the anger of
bereavement,--filled him, and he glared into the tempest and twisted
the wheel as though combating a sentient adversary.

An hour passed, Cimmerian blackness had fallen. The waves came
savagely, ill-defined masses let loose from a viewless limbo to work
their harm. Sometimes they caught the dull gray flash of breaking
waters, but more often everything was hidden. The roar of the wind and
wave was incessant.

Dan's efforts to keep the derelict's head to the seas had failed. The
hulk had slued around and was driving before the tempest, whither he
did not know. Groaning, crashing, crackling, the hulk lumbered on.
Once a wave leaped over the stern, stunning them with its thunderous
impact, dragging at them powerfully, as though to draw them back into
the sea whence it came.

Plunging thus, helpless, unseeing, they seemed to be flying as swiftly
as the wind. A wild ride--to where? Were they driving out into the
lonely heart of the deep, there to perish in a last long dive? Or was
it shoreward, with oblivion coming in the dreadful grinding and
crashing and shattering of timbers?

Neither had the heart for even a faint hope for safety; and yet Dan,
with his hands stiffened on the wheel spokes, fought on. The girl,
with her head bowed, sat still, her hands clinging