It was now the sixth day since we had left the Pirate, and we figured that she must have rounded the Cape, and would now be standing along up the South Atlantic with the steady southeast trade behind her.  Other ships would be in the latitude of Cape Town, and if we could make the northing, we might raise one and be picked up.  I pictured the horrors the poor girl sitting beside me must endure if we were adrift for days in the whale-boat.  What she had already gone through was enough to shake the nerves of the strongest woman, but here she sat, quietly looking at the water, her eyes sometimes filled with tears, while not a word of complaint escaped her lips.

Her example nerved me.  I had passed the order to stop all talking except when necessary, as it would only add to thirst.  We ran along in silence.

We had no compass save the one hanging to my watch-chain, as big as my thumb-nail, but I managed to make a pretty straight course for all that.  The wind freshened and was quite cool.  The sunlight, sparkling over the ocean, which now turned dark blue with a speck of white here and there to windward, warmed us enough to keep off actual chill, but the men who had taken off their coats to make a little more of a spread to the fair wind soon requested permission to put them on again.  Sitting absolutely quiet as we were, the air was keener than if we were going about the sheltered decks of a ship.

On we went, the swell rolling under us and giving us a twisting motion.  Sometimes we would be in a long hollow where the breeze would fail.  Then, as we rose sternwrard, the little sail would fill, and away we would go, racing along the slanting crest of the long sea, the foam rushing from the boat’s sides with a hopeful, hissing sound, until the swell would gain on us and go under, leaving the boat with her bow pointing up the receding slope and her headway almost gone, to drop into the following hollow and repeat the action.

The English sailor who had drank the water was now stone dead.  Johnson gave me a look, and I began a conversation with Miss Sackett, endeavoring to engage her attention.  A splash from forward made her look, and she saw what had happened.  Then she turned and, looking up at me, placed her soft little hand on mine which lay upon the tiller.

“You are very good to me, Mr. Rolling, but I can stand suffering as well as a man,” she said.  “I thank you just the same.”  Then her eyes filled and she turned away her face.  I found something to fix at the rudder head, and when I was through she was looking over the blue water where the lumpy trade clouds showed above the horizon’s rim.

As the day wore on, the hunger of the men began to show itself.  Jenks kept his wrinkled, leather face to the northward, looking steadily for a sail, but the other sailors glanced aft several times, and I noticed the strange glare of the eye which tells of the hungry animal.  Some of these men had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours.  One big, heavy-looking young sailor glanced back several times from the clew of his eye at the girl sitting aft.  But I fixed my gaze upon him so steadily that he shifted his seat and looked forward.