ere is nothing to know. I have given you my name, which is
practically all I own in the world. I needed a chance to recover from
an illness, and I was obliged to work. This offered the best
opportunity to combine both."

"You are not getting much chance--to rest," she said, with a sigh, and
got up. I went with her to the companionway, and opened the door. She
turned and looked at me.

"Good-night."

"Good-night, Miss Lee."

"I--I feel very safe with you on guard," she said, and held out her
hand. I took it in mine, with my heart leaping. It was as cold as ice.

That night, at four bells, I mustered the crew as silently as possible
around the jollyboat, and we lowered it into the water. The possibility
of a dead calm had convinced me that the sooner it was done the better.
We arranged to tow the boat astern, and Charlie Jones suggested a white
light in its bow, so we could be sure at night that it had not broken
loose.

Accordingly, we attached to the bow of the jolly-boat a tailed block
with an endless fall riven through it, so as to be able to haul in and
refill the lantern. Five bells struck by the time we had arranged the
towing-line.

We dropped the jolly-boat astern and made fast the rope. It gave me a
curious feeling, that small boat rising and falling behind us, with its
dead crew, and its rocking light, and, on its side above the
water-line, the black cross--a curious feeling of pursuit, as if,
across the water, they in the boat were following us. And, perhaps
because the light varied, sometimes it seemed to drop behind, as if
wearying of the chase, and again, in great leaps, to be overtaking us,
to be almost upon us.

An open boat with a small white light and a black cross on the side.

CHAPTER XIV

FROM THE CROW'S NEST

The night passed without incident, except for one thing that we were
unable to verify. At six bells, during the darkest hour of the night
that precedes the early dawn of summer, Adams, from the crow's-nest,
called down, in a panic, that there was something crawling on all fours
on the deck below him.

Burns, on watch at the companionway, ran forward with his revolver, and
narrowly escaped being brained--Adams at that moment flinging down a
marlinespike that he had carried aloft with him.

I heard the crash and joined Burns, and together we went over the deck
and, both houses. Everything was quiet: the crew in various attitudes
of exhausted sleep, their ches