However, it was a serious moment, as the grave faces of the sailors bore witness.  For the three preceding months the Mary Thomas sealing schooner, had hunted the seal pack along the coast of Japan and north to Bering Sea.  Here, on the Asiatic side of the sea, they were forced to give over the chase, or rather, to go no farther; for beyond, the Russian cruisers patrolled forbidden ground, where the seals might breed in peace.

A week before she had fallen into a heavy fog accompanied by calm.  Since then the fog-bank had not lifted, and the only wind had been light airs and catspaws.  This in itself was not so bad, for the sealing schooners are never in a hurry so long as they are in the midst of the seals; but the trouble lay in the fact that the current at this point bore heavily to the north.  Thus the Mary Thomas had unwittingly drifted across the line, and every hour she was penetrating, unwillingly, farther and farther into the dangerous waters where the Russian bear kept guard.

How far she had drifted no man knew.  The sun had not been visible for a week, nor the stars, and the captain had been unable to take observations in order to determine his position.  At any moment a cruiser might swoop down and hale the crew away to Siberia.  The fate of other poaching seal-hunters was too well known to the men of the Mary Thomas, and there was cause for grave faces.

“Mine friends,” spoke up a German boat-steerer, “it vas a pad piziness.  Shust as ve make a big catch, und all honest, somedings go wrong, und der Russians nab us, dake our skins and our schooner, und send us mit der anarchists to Siberia.  Ach! a pretty pad piziness!”

“Yes, that’s where it hurts,” the sea lawyer went on.  “Fifteen hundred skins in the salt piles, and all honest, a big pay-day coming to every man Jack of us, and then to be captured and lose it all!  It’d be different if we’d been poaching, but it’s all honest work in open water.”

“But if we haven’t done anything wrong, they can’t do anything to us, can they?” Bub queried.

“It strikes me as ‘ow it ain’t the proper thing for a boy o’ your age shovin’ in when ’is elders is talkin’,” protested an English sailor, from over the edge of his bunk.

“Oh, that’s all right, Jack,” answered the sea-lawyer.  “He’s a perfect right to.  Ain’t he just as liable to lose his wages as the rest of us?”

“Wouldn’t give thruppence for them!” Jack sniffed back.  He had been planning to go home and see his family in Chelsea when he was paid off, and he was now feeling rather blue over the highly possible loss, not only of his pay, but of his liberty.

“How are they to know?” the sea-lawyer asked in answer to Bub’s previous question.  “Here we are in forbidden water.  How do they know but what we came here of our own accord?  Here we are, fifteen hundred skins in the hold.  How do they know whether we got them in open water or in the closed sea?  Don’t you see, Bub, the evidence is all against us.  If you caught a man with his pockets full of apples like those which grow on your tree, and if you caught him in your tree besides, what’d you think if he told you he couldn’t help it, and had just been sort of blown there, and that anyway those apples came from some other tree—­what’d you think, eh?”