staggered as though drunk with the water she had swallowed, for at one
place near the bows the water ran in and out as through a slit in a wine
skin. The coast had altogether disappeared, and the huge ocean--vast,
stormy, and threatening--heaved and hissed all around them. It seemed
impossible that they should live until morning. But Rufus Dawes, with
his eyes fixed on some object visible alone to him, hugged the child in
his arms, and drove the quivering coracle into the black waste of night
and sea. To Frere, sitting sullenly in the bows, the aspect of this grim
immovable figure, with its back-blown hair and staring eyes, had in it
something supernatural and horrible. He began to think that privation
and anxiety had driven the unhappy convict mad.

Thinking and shuddering over his fate, he fell--as it seemed to
him--into a momentary sleep, in the midst of which someone called to
him. He started up, with shaking knees and bristling hair. The day had
broken, and the dawn, in one long pale streak of sickly saffron, lay low
on the left hand. Between this streak of saffron-coloured light and the
bows of the boat gleamed for an instant a white speck.

"A sail! a sail!" cried Rufus Dawes, a wild light gleaming in his eyes,
and a strange tone vibrating in his voice. "Did I not tell you that I
saw a sail?"

Frere, utterly confounded, looked again, with his heart in his mouth,
and again did the white speck glimmer. For an instant he felt almost
safe, and then a blanker despair than before fell upon him. From the
distance at which she was, it was impossible for the ship to sight the
boat.

"They will never see us!" he cried. "Dawes--Dawes! Do you hear? They
will never see us!"

Rufus Dawes started as if from a trance. Lashing the sheet to the pole
which served as a gunwale, he laid the sleeping child by her mother, and
tearing up the strip of bark on which he had been sitting, moved to the
bows of the boat.

"They will see this! Tear up that board! So! Now, place it thus across
the bows. Hack off that sapling end! Now that dry twist of osier! Never
mind the boat, man; we can afford to leave her now. Tear off that outer
strip of hide. See, the wood beneath is dry! Quick--you are so slow."

"What are you going to do?" cried Frere, aghast, as the convict tore
up all the dry wood he could find, and heaped it on the sheet of bark
placed on the bows.

"To make a fire! See!"

Frere began to comprehend. "I have three matche