“If she should do to us, sir, what that other one did to the Essex,” Dag Daughtry observed to the Ancient Mariner.

“It would be no more than we deserve,” was the response.  “It was uncalled-for—­a wanton, cruel act.”

Michael, aware of the excitement overside but unable to see because of the rail, leaped on top of the cabin and at sight of the monster barked defiantly.  Every eye turned on him in startlement and fear, and Steward hushed him with a whispered command.

“This is the last time,” Grimshaw muttered in a low voice, tense with anger, to Nishikanta.  “If ever again, on this voyage, you take a shot at a whale, I’ll wring your dirty neck for you.  Get me.  I mean it.  I’ll choke your eye-balls out of you.”

The Jew smiled in a sickly way and whined, “There ain’t nothing going to happen.  I don’t believe that Essex ever was sunk by a whale.”

Urged on by its mother, the dying calf made spasmodic efforts to swim that were futile and caused it to veer and wallow from side to side.

In the course of circling about it, the mother accidentally brushed her shoulder under the port quarter of the Mary Turner, and the Mary Turner listed to starboard as her stern was lifted a yard or more.  Nor was this unintentional, gentle impact all.  The instant after her shoulder had touched, startled by the contact, she flailed out with her tail.  The blow smote the rail just for’ard of the fore-shrouds, splintering a gap through it as if it were no more than a cigar-box and cracking the covering board.

That was all, and an entire ship’s company stared down in silence and fear at a sea-monster grief-stricken over its dying progeny.

Several times, in the course of an hour, during which the schooner and the two whales drifted farther and farther apart, the calf strove vainly to swim.  Then it set up a great quivering, which culminated in a wild wallowing and lashing about of its tail.

“It is the death-flurry,” said the Ancient Mariner softly.

“By damn, it’s dead,” was Captain Doane’s comment five minutes later.  “Who’d believe it?  A rifle bullet!  I wish to heaven we could get half an hour’s breeze of wind to get us out of this neighbourhood.”

“A close squeak,” said Grimshaw,

Captain Doane shook his head, as his anxious eyes cast aloft to the empty canvas and quested on over the sea in the hope of wind-ruffles on the water.  But all was glassy calm, each great sea, of all the orderly procession of great seas, heaving up, round-topped and mountainous, like so much quicksilver.

“It’s all right,” Grimahaw encouraged.  “There she goes now, beating it away from us.”

“Of course it’s all right, always was all right,” Nishikanta bragged, as he wiped the sweat from his face and neck and looked with the others after the departing whale.  “You’re a fine brave lot, you are, losing your goat to a fish.”