y that tore at the ocean's breast. And at the
same moment the gale from the south-west ceased. There was no gale, no
moving zephyrs, nothing but a vast quietude of air.

"What is it?" I gasped, out of equilibrium from the abrupt cessation of
wind.

"The shift," he said. "There she comes."

And it came, from the north-west, a blast of wind, a blow, an atmospheric
impact that bewildered and stunned and again made the _Elsinore_ harp
protest. It forced me down on the rail. I was like a windle-straw. As
I faced this new abruptness of gale it drove the air back into my lungs,
so that I suffocated and turned my head aside to breathe in the lee of
the draught. The man at the wheel again listened to the Gabriel voice;
and Mr. Pike, on the deck below, listened and repeated the will of the
voice; and Captain West, in slender and stately balance, leaned into the
face of the wind and slowly paced the deck.

It was magnificent. Now, and for the first time, I knew the sea, and the
men who overlord the sea. Captain West had vindicated himself, exposited
himself. At the height and crisis of storm he had taken charge of the
_Elsinore_, and Mr. Pike had become, what in truth was all he was, the
foreman of a gang of men, the slave-driver of slaves, serving the one
from beyond--the Samurai.

A minute or so longer Captain West strolled up and down, leaning easily
into the face of this new and abominable gale or resting his back against
it, and then he went below, pausing for a moment, his hand on the knob of
the chart-room door, to cast a last measuring look at the storm-white sea
and wrath-sombre sky he had mastered.

Ten minutes later, below, passing the open cabin door, I glanced in and
saw him. Sea-boots and storm-trappings were gone; his feet, in carpet
slippers, rested on a hassock; while he lay back in the big leather chair
smoking dreamily, his eyes wide open, absorbed, non-seeing--or, if they
saw, seeing things beyond the reeling cabin walls and beyond my ken. I
have developed an immense respect for Captain West, though now I know him
less than the little I thought I knew him before.

CHAPTER XIII

Small wonder that Miss West remains sea-sick on an ocean like this, which
has become a factory where the veering gales manufacture the selectest
and most mountainous brands of cross-seas. The way the poor _Elsinore_
pitches, plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her lofty spars and masts
and all her five tho