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At eight o’clock that morning we piped to breakfast, and Miss Shirley-Winthrop and the second stewardess emerged from the nest I had rigged up for them in the eyes of the boat. As they came aft I ventured to express the hope that they had passed a comfortable night and slept well. Then, for the first time since I had been brought into contact with her, Miss Shirley-Winthrop looked at, instead of through and beyond me. She cast upon me a glance of scorn and contempt which ought to have withered me—but didn’t—and remarked, with a toss of her pretty head—

“Comfortable! slept well! Surely you must be jesting at our misery, sir. How do you suppose it possible for any woman to be comfortable in a stifling little hole like that, or to sleep with the rattle of oars going on all night?”

“I am awfully sorry if you have passed a bad night,” I said. “Of course I know that it is very different from the accommodation aboard the poor old Andromeda, but it is the best that could be contrived, under the circumstances. And, if I may be permitted to say so, your ‘misery’ does not appear to have visibly affected either of you, thus far.”

“I am sure it has not affected me,” laughed the stewardess, “for I was very comfortable all through the night, except for the heat, while I was able to get some quite long snatches of sleep. And this morning I feel fresh, and fit for anything. Is there anything I can do to help, Mr Massey?”

“Yes,” I said, “there is. After breakfast I will teach you how to steer the boat by compass; and when you have learned, you will be able to release one man to snatch a little additional rest. And rest, I can assure you, is going to be valuable to us men, so long as this calm lasts.”

I added the last remark chiefly to afford Miss Shirley-Winthrop an opening to volunteer her services also; but she said not a word, and did not appear to have heard my remark.

Breakfast over, we threw out the oars again and resumed our voyage. Oldroyd and Wilkinson doing the hard work while I coached the stewardess in the art of steering. Within half-an-hour the girl had so perfectly acquired the knack that I was able to leave the boat in her hands and stretch myself out for a brief nap. But, as I did so, I saw the Doctor’s daughter shift over into the seat which I had vacated beside the stewardess, and before I dropped off to sleep she was getting Lucy Stroud to initiate her into the mysteries of steering.

“Good!” thought I. “The girl is all right at heart, I’ll bet. What is the matter with her is that she has been thoroughly spoilt, from her babyhood up, and has never been thwarted. This little boat excursion is going to do her a lot of good, if I am not mistaken.”

That day was a terrible day for all of us. The air was stagnant, not so much as the ghost of a catspaw wrinkled the oil-smooth surface of the swell. There was not a cloud in the whole of the vast vault that overarched us, but the rich blue was still dimmed, as on the previous day, by a haze which should have tempered the heat of the sun, but did not, on the contrary, it seemed somehow, to impart an added sting to his beams, which beat down upon us with such a virulence of scorching power that our arms, backs and shoulders, even where protected by our shirts, began to blister and smart cruelly. An hour at the oars was an hour of torment, and as I saw the oarsmen wincing at the chafe of their shirts upon their blistered skins, I was more than once inclined to bid them knock off. Yet each time reflection reminded me that away down there, some hundreds of miles to the southward, was the Paramatta rushing northward under the impulse of her powerful engines, and that if we wished to cross her path in time to intercept her—as most certainly we did—we must not waste a moment, though we should chafe our bodies raw in our eagerness. Even for the two girls, whose hardest work was steering the boat—a task which they had quietly but firmly taken upon themselves—the heat was excessively trying though they shared the protection of a handsome silk and lace sunshade which Miss Shirley-Winthrop had had the vanity—or the good sense, as things turned out—to bring from the ship with her. Yes, it was a terrible day for all of us; even when we were not exerting ourselves at all the perspiration streamed from us, and this resulted in a continuous, parching thirst which the meagre allowance of water that our resources permitted seemed to aggravate rather than allay. None of us took very much solid food, the intolerable smart of our scorched and blistered bodies set up a fever which robbed us of all appetite and induced a racking headache that drove us nearly crazy. Dartnell, the ordinary seaman, suffered to such an extent that we had to restrain him from going overboard in the hope that the comparative coolness of the sea would afford relief. But we did the next best thing we could for him, we drenched him, clothes and all, with salt-water, as he sat in the bottom of the boat, and he declared so emphatically that the treatment had relieved him, that Wilkinson, Oldroyd and I tried it on ourselves. And it did afford us relief and comfort for a short time; but we paid for the relief in another way, for the salt-water stung our broken blisters until the smart tormented us even more acutely than our earlier sufferings had done.

Our miseries during the ensuing forty-eight hours were a repetition of those of the day I have described only in an aggravated form. Night, with the absence of the blazing, scorching sun, afforded us some measure of relief, and although we ached in every joint, and our shoulders, the backs of our necks, and our arms were covered with great raw, bleeding patches, where the blisters had burst and the skin had been chafed to rags by the friction of our clothing, we somehow kept the boat going all through the night. But about an hour before noon of the next day the last of us—myself—collapsed completely, and for the next thirty hours the jollyboat lay “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” with all the men aboard her, except the Doctor, delirious with pain and exhaustion. He and the stewardess got busy—the latter said that the Doctor’s daughter helped, too, until we began to show signs of returning consciousness. I don’t quite know of what Doctor Shirley-Winthrop’s treatment consisted, for he had no medicines with him, and the stewardess seemed to know little more about it than we did, although she helped the Doctor to treat us. All I know is that our raw places had been somehow treated or dressed, and had been bound up with soft material that had come from heaven knows where, that our delirium had vanished, and much of our pain and discomfort with it, and that upon investigation, our stock of fresh-water proved to be alarmingly low. I suspected that Doctor Shirley-Winthrop had used it unsparingly in his treatment of his patients; but be that as it may, I have scarcely a doubt that he saved our lives.

But to what end had he saved them? That was the question that now exercised me. For the morrow of the day upon which we recovered our senses was the day when the Paramatta was due to pass the spot for which we were aiming. And, as nearly as I could reckon it, we were at that moment close upon one hundred and eighty miles from that spot, with the weather still stark calm! One hundred and eighty miles in twenty-four hours! It could not be done—unless we happened to have a gale of wind behind us, of which at that moment there was no sign.

The more I thought of it the more clear to me did it become that it was useless to think of intercepting the Paramatta. Carefully I went over my calculations again, only to come to the conclusion that, if we were to take to the oars again and pull for all we were worth during the twenty-four hours, we should never get nearer to her than within about a hundred miles, after which the distance would begin to widen again, and go on widening.

Then, if we were to admit the impossibility of intercepting the Paramatta—and I could see nothing else for it—what were we to do? There was the outward-bound steamer from Honolulu to Suva, but we should miss her too, for according to her time table she was at that moment—there or thereabout—passing us, bound south, about one hundred and twenty miles away, and she would not be coming north again for another month. Also it would be useless to think of hanging about where we were, in the hope of being seen and picked up by some passing craft, for we were in a part of the Pacific Ocean which is rarely traversed by craft of any description, save those of the Inter-Oceanic Steamship Company. Of course there remained the Union group of islands, due south of us, of which the skipper had spoken as an alternative to being picked up by the Paramatta. We could keep doggedly on as we were going, and if nothing untoward occurred, and our provisions and water held out, in time we should reach them. Yes, that was just the point: would our provisions and water hold out? I estimated that the Union group was still nearly nine hundred miles distant, and, taking the most favourable view of probabilities, I did not see any prospect of our being able to reach them in less than twelve days at the least. It might take us more than that; it would not be prudent to reckon on less. Then I took stock of our supply of food and water. Of the former I found that we had sufficient to last us, at our normal rate of consumption, a fortnight; but our water! Gauging it as carefully as I could, I made it just six gallons, the equivalent of one pint per day per head for six days!

I determined to take my companions into my confidence, and consult with them as to what should be our next move. Since it was impossible for us to intercept the Paramatta, they had a right to express an opinion upon the alternative to be adopted, whether we should continue to push southward in the hope of making the Union group, or whether we should—do something else.

I put the case to them, and I was relieved to find that, so far at least as two of them—Messrs. Oldroyd and Mason—were concerned, they too, had been thinking matters over, and were by no means surprised. Neither were the two seamen, nor the stewardess, though the latter had kept her surmises strictly to herself, waiting patiently for me to speak. It was only the doctor—and possibly his daughter, who apparently had nothing to say upon the matter—who had failed to grasp the significance of the disastrous calm, and all that it involved. He had been looking forward with the utmost confidence to being picked up by the Paramatta and it took a good deal of explanation to make it clear that we had lost that chance. When he grasped the situation, he said—

“Supposing, Mr Massey, you were alone in this boat, or—what amounts practically to the same thing—we landsmen were to say to you, ‘We know absolutely nothing about such matters as these, and are therefore willing to abide by a decision based upon your professional experience and judgment,’ what would you do?”

It was the very point that had been puzzling me; but it was one that had to be faced, and I had finally made up my mind upon it.

“I should be guided entirely by circumstances,” I replied. “The first and most imperative thing to be done is to cut down our allowance of water to the lowest possible limit. For the rest, we must be governed by the direction of the wind—when it comes. We are now in the belt of tropical calms, where absence of wind and frequent tremendous downpours of rain are common; but these spells of calm are frequently varied by light airs which come from any point of the compass, while more or less violent squalls are not infrequent. Now, we know where the Union group is. If the winds permit, we will try to make them, but if not, I believe there are clusters of islands at no great distance away down to the south-west. If we cannot make the Unions, our wisest plan would be to head south-west and try to hit one of the islands of which I have spoken; for, by so doing, we should also have a chance of being picked up by one of the copra and shell traders that cruise among those islands.”

“I don’t see that we can do anything else,” remarked Oldroyd, appealing to the company.

“Most sensible thing, I think,” agreed his friend, Mason.

“Can you suggest a better plan, Doctor?” I demanded.

“Of course he cannot,” snapped his daughter. “He is a landsman, and knows nothing about the sea. But I am very sorry that Captain Cupples did not appoint us to one of the other boats. We should at least have been with an officer who would know what to do without consulting his passengers.”

Inwardly, I heartily shared the young lady’s regret, and was almost provoked into saying so; but I kept my temper, remembering all that the poor, spoiled beauty had to put up with; and replied, with the most cheerful smile I could muster—

“Very well, then; it is settled that we follow the procedure I have suggested. And, thank God! there is a little breeze coming to help us. D’ye see that catspaw away out there on the port bow, Wilkinson? Bend on the halliard and hoist the sail. We must utilise every breath of wind that comes to us; they are much too precious to be wasted.”

* * *

* * *

Chapter Three: Weird Happenings.

There were catspaws playing all round us now, and presently Wilkinson, standing up in the boat and shading his eyes with one hand, pointed away to the southward with the other, indicating a narrow line of rich ultramarine blue that stretched right along the southern horizon, with numerous catspaws of the same tint impinging upon the surface of the water between us and it, flickering lightly hither and thither for a few moments and then merging into each other until patches of blue an acre or more in extent became quite numerous, these in turn merging into each other and extending in every direction. Finally, one of these bigger patches of blue spread until it took the jollyboat into its gracious embrace, when with a slight preliminary rustling, the sail filled, the sheet tautened, and with a heel of about one strake to starboard, and a musical tinkling of water along our bends, we gathered way and began to “catch” in west-south-westerly direction at the rate of about two knots. Gradually the breeze grew stronger until within an hour we were doing four knots, with perhaps a bit over.

That breeze lasted all through the night and well into the morning of the next day, dying away about eleven o’clock in the forenoon. But I did not anticipate another long spell of calm, on the contrary, I was afraid that our next trouble would be that of too much wind, for with the dying away of the breeze a great bank of slatey-blue cloud began to gather and rise along the western horizon, threatening a thunder-storm; and I knew from past experience, that in those latitudes a thunder-storm frequently breaks with furious wind squalls, dangerous to a small open boat.

The storm was slow to come, but it broke at last, about three o’clock in the afternoon, in the form—to my great relief—of just an ordinary tropical thunder-storm, without wind, but finishing up with a perfect deluge of rain which descended from the overcharged clouds in such torrents that by catching it in our outspread sail, we could re-fill our water breakers, to my intense relief. Of course, we also all got drenched to the skin—except Miss Shirley-Winthrop, who so far honoured me as to accept the loan of my “oily”—but that did not really matter, for the rain was tepid and the drenching was agreeable rather than otherwise.