e!"

"Why?" he exclaimed. "She took the ice smoothly; she has not been
strained; she was as tight as a bottle before she stranded; the coating
of ice will have cherished her; and a stout ship like this does not
suffer from six months of lying up!"

Six months, thought I!

"Well, it may be as you say; but if she leaks it will not be in our four
arms to keep her free."

He exclaimed hotly, "Mr. Rodney, if we are to escape, we must venture
something. To stay here means death in the end. I am persuaded that this
ice is joined with some vast main body far south and that it does not
move. What is there, then, to wait for? There is promise in your
gunpowder proposal. If she capsizes then the devil will get his own."
And with a savage flourish of the pannikin he put it to his lips and
drained it.

His sullen determination that we should stand or fall by my scheme was
not very useful to me. I had looked for some shrewdness in him, some
capacity of originating and weighing ideas; but I found he could do
little more than curse and swagger and ply his can, in which he found
most of his anecdotes and recollections and not a little of his courage.
I pulled out my watch, as I must call it, and observed that it was hard
upon one o'clock.

"'Tis lucky," said he, eying the watch greedily and coming to it away
from the great subject of our deliverance as though the sight of the
fine gold thing with its jewelled letter extinguished every other
thought in him, "that you removed that watch from Mendoza. But he will
have carried other good things to the bottom with him, I fear."

"His flask and tobacco-box I took away," said I. "He had nothing of
consequence besides."

"They must go into the common-chest," cried he; "'tis share and share,
you know."

"Ay," said I, "but what I found on Mendoza is mine by the highest right
under heaven. If I had not taken the things, they would now be at the
bottom of the sea."

"What of that?" cried he savagely. "If we had not plundered the galleon,
she might have been wrecked and taken all she had down with her. Yet
should such a consideration hinder a fair division as between
us--between you who had nothing to do with the pillage and me who risked
my life in it?"

I said, "Very well; be it as you say," appearing to consent, for there
was something truly absurd in an altercation about a few guineas' worth
of booty in the face of our melancholy and most perilous situation;
though it not only en