“You are now face to face with death, and I perceive from your lips that you are praying.  My son was also face to face with death, and he prayed, also.  It happened that a general officer came up, and he heard the lad praying for his mother, and it moved him so—­he being himself a father—­that he ordered his Uhlans away, and he remained with his aide-de-camp only, beside the condemned men.  And when he heard all the lad had to tell—­that he was the only child of an old family, and that his mother was in failing health—­he threw off the rope as I throw off this, and he kissed him on either cheek, as I kiss you, and he bade him go, as I bid you go, and may every kind wish of that noble general, though it could not stave off the fever which slew my son, descend now upon your head.”

And so it was that Captain Baumgarten, disfigured, blinded, and bleeding, staggered out into the wind and the rain of that wild December dawn.

THE STRIPED CHEST

“What do you make of her, Allardyce?” I asked.

My second mate was standing beside me upon the poop, with his short, thick legs astretch, for the gale had left a considerable swell behind it, and our two quarter-boats nearly touched the water with every roll.  He steadied his glass against the mizzen-shrouds, and he looked long and hard at this disconsolate stranger every time she came reeling up on to the crest of a roller and hung balanced for a few seconds before swooping down upon the other side.  She lay so low in the water that I could only catch an occasional glimpse of a pea-green line of bulwark.  She was a brig, but her mainmast had been snapped short off some 10ft. above the deck, and no effort seemed to have been made to cut away the wreckage, which floated, sails and yards, like the broken wing of a wounded gull upon the water beside her.  The foremast was still standing, but the foretopsail was flying loose, and the headsails were streaming out in long, white pennons in front of her.  Never have I seen a vessel which appeared to have gone through rougher handling.  But we could not be surprised at that, for there had been times during the last three days when it was a question whether our own barque would ever see land again.  For thirty-six hours we had kept her nose to it, and if the Mary Sinclair had not been as good a seaboat as ever left the Clyde, we could not have gone through.  And yet here we were at the end of it with the loss only of our gig and of part of the starboard bulwark.  It did not astonish us, however, when the smother had cleared away, to find that others had been less lucky, and that this mutilated brig staggering about upon a blue sea and under a cloudless sky, had been left, like a blinded man after a lightning flash, to tell of the terror which is past.  Allardyce, who was a slow and methodical Scotchman, stared long and hard at the little craft, while our seamen lined the bulwark or clustered upon the fore shrouds to have a view of the stranger.  In latitude 20 degrees and longitude 10 degrees, which were about our bearings, one becomes a little curious as to whom one meets, for one has left the main lines of Atlantic commerce to the north.  For ten days we had been sailing over a solitary sea.