Nothing more developed for a long time except a savage fight between Pulz and Perdosa.  I hunted sheep, fished, wandered about—­always with an escort tired to death before he started.  The thought came to me to kill this man and so to escape and make cause with the scientists.  My common sense forbade me.  I begin to think that common sense is a very foolish faculty indeed.

It taught me the obvious—­that all this idle, vapouring talk was common enough among men of this class, so common that it would hardly justify a murder, would hardly explain an unwarranted intrusion on those who employed me.  How would it look for me to go to them with these words in my mouth: 

“The captain has taken to drinking to dull the monotony.  The crew think you are an alchemist and are making diamonds.  Their interest in this fact seemed to me excessive, so I killed one of them, and here I am.”

“And who are you?” they could ask.

“I am a reporter,” would be my only truthful reply.

You can see the false difficulties of my position.  I do not defend my attitude.  Undoubtedly a born leader of men, like Captain Selover at his best, would have known how to act with the proper decision both now and in the inception of the first mutiny.  At heart I never doubted the reality of the crisis.

Even Percy Darrow saw the surliness of the men’s attitudes, and with his usual good sense divined the cause.

“You chaps are getting lazy,” said he, “why don’t you do something?  Where’s the captain?”

They growled something about there being nothing to do, and explained that the captain preferred to live aboard.

“Don’t blame him,” said Darrow, “but he might give us a little of his squeaky company occasionally.  Boys, I’ll tell you something about seals.  The old bull seals have long, stiff whiskers—­a foot long.  Do you know there’s a market for those whiskers?  Well, there is.  The Chinese mount them in gold and use them for cleaners for their long pipes.  Each whisker is worth from six bits to a dollar and a quarter.  Why don’t you kill a few bull seal for the ’trimmings’?”

“Nothin’ to do with a voodoo?” grunted Handy Solomon.

Darrow laughed amusedly.  “No, this is the truth,” he assured.  “I’ll tell you what:  I’ll give you boys six bits apiece for the whisker hairs, and four bits for the galls.  I expect to sell them at a profit.”

Next morning they shook off their lethargy and went seal-hunting.  I was practically commanded to attend.  This attitude had been growing of late:  now it began to take a definite form.

“Mr. Eagan, don’t you want to go hunting?” or “Mr. Eagen, I guess I’ll just go along with you to stretch my legs,” had given way to, “We’re going fishing:  you’d better come along.”