“Ha-ah!” said Daughtry across the hundred yards of ocean.

Next, and without hurry, Grimshaw took the more comfortable seat for himself.

“Want to come along?” he called to Daughtry.

“No, thank you, sir,” was the latter’s reply.  “There’s too many of us, an’ we’ll make out better in the other boat.”

With some bailing, and with others bending to the oars, the boat rowed frantically away, while Daughtry took Ah Moy with him down into the lazarette beneath the cabin floor and broke out and passed up more provisions.

It was when he was thus below that the cow grazed the schooner just for’ard of amidships on the port side, lashed out with her mighty tail as she sounded, and ripped clean away the chain plates and rail of the mizzen-shrouds.  In the next roll of the huge, glassy sea, the mizzen-mast fell overside.

“My word, some whale,” Daughtry said to Ah Moy, as they emerged from the cabin companionway and gazed at this latest wreckage.

Ah Moy found need to get more food from the galley, when Daughtry, Kwaque, and Big John swung their weight on the falls, one at a time, and hoisted the port boat, one end at a time, over the rail and swung her out.

“We’ll wait till the next smash, then lower away, throw everything in, an’ get outa this,” the steward told the Ancient Mariner.  “Lots of time.  The schooner’ll sink no faster when she’s awash than she’s sinkin’ now.”

Even as he spoke, the scuppers were nearly level with the ocean, and her rolling in the big sea was sluggish.

“Hey!” he called with sudden forethought across the widening stretch of sea to Captain Doane.  “What’s the course to the Marquesas?  Right now?  And how far away, sir?”

“Nor’-nor’-east-quarter-east!” came the faint reply.  “Will fetch Nuka-Hiva!  About two hundred miles!  Haul on the south-east trade with a good full and you’ll make it!”

“Thank you, sir,” was the steward’s acknowledgment, ere he ran aft, disrupted the binnacle, and carried the steering compass back to the boat.

Almost, from the whale’s delay in renewing her charging, did they think she had given over.  And while they waited and watched her rolling on the sea an eighth of a mile away, the Mary Turner steadily sank.

“We might almost chance it,” Daughtry was debating aloud to Big John, when a new voice entered the discussion.

“Cocky!—­Cocky!” came plaintive tones from below out of the steerage companion.

“Devil be damned!” was the next, uttered in irritation and anger.  “Devil be damned!  Devil be damned!”

“Of course not,” was Daughtry’s judgment, as he dashed across the deck, crawled through the confusion of the main-topmast and its many stays that blocked the way, and found the tiny, white morsel of life perched on a bunk-edge, ruffling its feathers, erecting and flattening its rosy crest, and cursing in honest human speech the waywardness of the world and of ships and humans upon the sea.