Delivered squarely amidships, it was the hardest blow the Mary Turner had received.  Stays and splinters of rail flew in the air as she rolled so far over as to expose half her copper wet-glistening in the sun.  As she righted sluggishly, the mainmast swayed drunkenly in the air but did not fall.

“A knock-out!” Daughtry cried, at sight of the whale flurrying the water with aimless, gigantic splashings.  “It must a-smashed both of ’em.”

“Schooner he finish close up altogether,” Kwaque observed, as the Mary Turner’s rail disappeared.

Swiftly she sank, and no more than a matter of moments was it when the stump of her mainmast was gone.  Remained only the whale, floating and floundering, on the surface of the sea.

“It’s nothing to brag about,” Daughtry delivered himself of the Mary Turner’s epitaph.  “Nobody’d believe us.  A stout little craft like that sunk, deliberately sunk, by an old cow-whale!  No, sir.  I never believed that old moss-back in Honolulu, when he claimed he was a survivor of the sinkin’ of the Essex, an’ no more will anybody believe me.”

“The pretty schooner, the pretty clever craft,” mourned the Ancient Mariner.  “Never were there more dainty and lovable topmasts on a three-masted schooner, and never was there a three-masted schooner that worked like the witch she was to windward.”

Dag Daughtry, who had kept always footloose and never married, surveyed the boat-load of his responsibilities to which he was anchored—­Kwaque, the Black Papuan monstrosity whom he had saved from the bellies of his fellows; Ah Moy, the little old sea-cook whose age was problematical only by decades; the Ancient Mariner, the dignified, the beloved, and the respected; gangly Big John, the youthful Scandinavian with the inches of a giant and the mind of a child; Killeny Boy, the wonder of dogs; Scraps, the outrageously silly and fat-rolling puppy; Cocky, the white-feathered mite of life, imperious as a steel-blade and wheedlingly seductive as a charming child; and even the forecastle cat, the lithe and tawny slayer of rats, sheltering between the legs of Ah Moy.  And the Marquesas were two hundred miles distant full-hauled on the tradewind which had ceased but which was as sure to live again as the morning sun in the sky.

The steward heaved a sigh, and whimsically shot into his mind the memory-picture in his nursery-book of the old woman who lived in a shoe.  He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and was dimly aware of the area of the numbness that bordered the centre that was sensationless between his eyebrows, as he said: 

“Well, children, rowing won’t fetch us to the Marquesas.  We’ll need a stretch of wind for that.  But it’s up to us, right now, to put a mile or so between us an’ that peevish old cow.  Maybe she’ll revive, and maybe she won’t, but just the same I can’t help feelin’ leary about her.”