ndling
the _Ghost_ and picking up the boats myself. Wolf Larsen had been
smitten with one of his headaches, and I stood at the wheel from morning
until evening, sailing across the ocean after the last lee boat, and
heaving to and picking it and the other five up without command or
suggestion from him.

Gales we encountered now and again, for it was a raw and stormy region,
and, in the middle of June, a typhoon most memorable to me and most
important because of the changes wrought through it upon my future. We
must have been caught nearly at the centre of this circular storm, and
Wolf Larsen ran out of it and to the southward, first under a
double-reefed jib, and finally under bare poles. Never had I imagined so
great a sea. The seas previously encountered were as ripples compared
with these, which ran a half-mile from crest to crest and which upreared,
I am confident, above our masthead. So great was it that Wolf Larsen
himself did not dare heave to, though he was being driven far to the
southward and out of the seal herd.

We must have been well in the path of the trans-Pacific steamships when
the typhoon moderated, and here, to the surprise of the hunters, we found
ourselves in the midst of seals--a second herd, or sort of rear-guard,
they declared, and a most unusual thing. But it was "Boats over!" the
boom-boom of guns, and the pitiful slaughter through the long day.

It was at this time that I was approached by Leach. I had just finished
tallying the skins of the last boat aboard, when he came to my side, in
the darkness, and said in a low tone:

"Can you tell me, Mr. Van Weyden, how far we are off the coast, and what
the bearings of Yokohama are?"

My heart leaped with gladness, for I knew what he had in mind, and I gave
him the bearings--west-north-west, and five hundred miles away.

"Thank you, sir," was all he said as he slipped back into the darkness.

Next morning No. 3 boat and Johnson and Leach were missing. The
water-breakers and grub-boxes from all the other boats were likewise
missing, as were the beds and sea bags of the two men. Wolf Larsen was
furious. He set sail and bore away into the west-north-west, two hunters
constantly at the mastheads and sweeping the sea with glasses, himself
pacing the deck like an angry lion. He knew too well my sympathy for the
runaways to send me aloft as look-out.

The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle in a
haystack to rai