, and clothing ruined by oily
wood-pulp,--ruined particularly about the knees of their trousers,--came
wearily into the roadstead from the open sea, past the shipping, and up
to the landing at the custom-house docks. From here the twelve
proceeded to the American consul and entered bitter complaint of
inhuman treatment received at the hands of sixteen mutinous sailors on
board the _Almena_--treatment so cruel that they had welcomed being
turned adrift in an open boat; whereat, the consul, deploring the
absence of man-of-war or steamer to send in pursuit, took their
individual affidavits; and these he sent to San Francisco, from which
point the account of the crime, described as piracy, spread to every
newspaper in Christendom.

PART III

A Northeast gale off Hatteras: immense gray combers, five to the mile,
charging shoreward, occasionally breaking, again lifting their heads
too high in the effort, truncated as by a knife, and the liquid apex
shattered to spray; an expanse of leaden sky showing between the
rain-squalls, across which heavy background rushed the darker scud and
storm-clouds; a passenger-steamer rolling helplessly in the trough, and
a square-rigged vessel, hove to on the port tack, two miles to windward
of the steamer, and drifting south toward the storm-center. This is the
picture that the sea-birds saw at daybreak on a September morning, and
could the sea-birds have spoken they might have told that the
square-rigged craft carried a navigator who had learned that a whirling
fury of storm-center was less to be feared than the deadly Diamond
Shoals--the outlying guard of Cape Hatteras toward which that steamer
was drifting, broadside on.

Clad in yellow oilskins and sou'wester, he stood by the
after-companionway, intently examining through a pair of glasses the
wallowing steamer to leeward, barely distinguishable in the half-light
and driving spindrift. On the main-deck a half-dozen men paced up and
down, sheltered by the weather rail; forward, two others walked the
deck by the side of the forward house, but never allowed their march to
extend past the after-corner; and at the wheel stood a little man who
sheltered a cheerful face under the lee of a big coat-collar, and
occasionally peeped out at the navigator.

"Poop-deck," he shouted above the noise of the wind, "take the wheel
till I fire up."

"Thought I was exempt from steering," growled the other,
good-humoredly, as he placed the glasse