e wheel and the crew.
And the men jumped, though in their weakness the climb aloft was slow and
toilsome; and when the gaskets were off the topgallant-sails and the men
on deck were hoisting yards and sheeting home, those aloft were loosing
the royals.

While this work went on, and while the yards were being braced around,
the _Elsinore_, her bow pointing to the west, began moving through the
water before the first fair wind in a month and a half.

Slowly that light air fanned to a gentle breeze while all the time the
snow fell steadily. The barometer, down to 28.80, continued to fall, and
the breeze continued to grow upon itself. Tom Spink, passing by me on
the poop to lend a hand at the final finicky trimming of the
mizzen-yards, gave me a triumphant look. Superstition was vindicated.
Events had proved him right. Fair wind had come with the going of the
carpenter, which said warlock had incontestably taken with him overside
his bag of wind-tricks.

Mr. Pike strode up and down the poop, rubbing his hands, which he was too
disdainfully happy to mitten, chuckling and grinning to himself, glancing
at the draw of every sail, stealing adoring looks astern into the gray of
snow out of which blew the favouring wind. He even paused beside me to
gossip for a moment about the French restaurants of San Francisco and
how, therein, the delectable California fashion of cooking wild duck
obtained.

"Throw 'em through the fire," he chanted. "That's the way--throw 'em
through the fire--a hot oven, sixteen minutes--I take mine fourteen, to
the second--an' squeeze the carcasses."

By midday the snow had ceased and we were bowling along before a stiff
breeze. At three in the afternoon we were running before a growing gale.
It was across a mad ocean we tore, for the mounting sea that made from
eastward bucked into the West End Drift and battled and battered down the
huge south-westerly swell. And the big grinning dolt of a Finnish
carpenter, already food for fish and bird, was astern there somewhere in
the freezing rack and drive.

Make westing! We ripped it off across these narrowing degrees of
longitude at the southern tip of the planet where one mile counts for
two. And Mr. Pike, staring at his bending topgallant-yards, swore that
they could carry away for all he cared ere he eased an inch of canvas.
More he did. He set the huge crojack, biggest of all sails, and
challenged God or Satan to start a seam of it or all its