Nilson
and Leach, from the _San Diego_. So that, at the end of five days, we
found ourselves short but four men--Henderson, Holyoak, Williams, and
Kelly,--and were once more hunting on the flanks of the herd.

As we followed it north we began to encounter the dreaded sea-fogs. Day
after day the boats lowered and were swallowed up almost ere they touched
the water, while we on board pumped the horn at regular intervals and
every fifteen minutes fired the bomb gun. Boats were continually being
lost and found, it being the custom for a boat to hunt, on lay, with
whatever schooner picked it up, until such time it was recovered by its
own schooner. But Wolf Larsen, as was to be expected, being a boat
short, took possession of the first stray one and compelled its men to
hunt with the _Ghost_, not permitting them to return to their own
schooner when we sighted it. I remember how he forced the hunter and his
two men below, a riffle at their breasts, when their captain passed by at
biscuit-toss and hailed us for information.

Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life, was
soon limping about again and performing his double duties of cook and
cabin-boy. Johnson and Leach were bullied and beaten as much as ever,
and they looked for their lives to end with the end of the hunting
season; while the rest of the crew lived the lives of dogs and were
worked like dogs by their pitiless master. As for Wolf Larsen and
myself, we got along fairly well; though I could not quite rid myself of
the idea that right conduct, for me, lay in killing him. He fascinated
me immeasurably, and I feared him immeasurably. And yet, I could not
imagine him lying prone in death. There was an endurance, as of
perpetual youth, about him, which rose up and forbade the picture. I
could see him only as living always, and dominating always, fighting and
destroying, himself surviving.

One diversion of his, when we were in the midst of the herd and the sea
was too rough to lower the boats, was to lower with two boat-pullers and
a steerer and go out himself. He was a good shot, too, and brought many
a skin aboard under what the hunters termed impossible hunting
conditions. It seemed the breath of his nostrils, this carrying his life
in his hands and struggling for it against tremendous odds.

I was learning more and more seamanship; and one clear day--a thing we
rarely encountered now--I had the satisfaction of running and ha