between the sea and the sky the wind was forced at a greater pace,
dragging rain over the waters. Our fleet might have been half a mile
away, and we could have gone on, still looking for it. The day early
surrendered its light, a dismal submission to conditions that had made
its brief existence a failure. It had nearly gone when we sighted
another trawler. She was the _Susie_. She was smaller than the
_Windhover_. We went close enough to hail the men standing knee-deep in
the wash on her deck. It would not be easy to forget the _Susie_. I
shall always see her, at the moment when our skipper began to shout
through his hands at her. She was poised askew, in that arrested
instant, on a glassy slope of water, with its crest foaming above her.
Surge blotted her out amid-ships, and her streaming forefoot jutted
clear. She plunged then into the hollow between us, showing us the plan
of her deck, for her funnel was pointing at us. Her men bawled to us.
They said the _Susie_ had sighted nothing.

Our engine-bell rang for us to part company. Our little friend dropped
astern. She seemed a poor little thing, with a squirt of steam to keep
her alive in that stupendous and hurrying world. A man on her raised his
arm to us in salute, and she vanished.


4

The talk of our skipper, who began to be preoccupied and abrupt veered to
the subject of Jonah. We should now have been with our fleet, but were
alone in the wilderness, and any course we took would be as likely as
another. "This hasn't happened to me for years," he apologized. He
stared about him, tapping the weather-dodger with his fingers, and
whistled reflectively. He turned to the man at the wheel. "Take her