"Who can blame one for loving the sea?" Miss West cried out
exultantly, as she wrung the rain from her ropes of hair which had
gone adrift in the turmoil. "And the men of the sea!" she cried.
"The masters of the sea! You saw my father . . . "

"He is a king," I said.

"He is a king," she repeated after me.

And the Elsinore lifted on a cresting sea and flung down on her side,
so that we were thrown together and brought up breathless against the
wall.

I said good-night to her at the foot of the stairs, and as I passed
the open door to the cabin I glanced in. There sat Captain West,
whom I had thought still on deck. His storm-trappings were removed,
his sea-boots replaced by slippers; and he leaned back in the big
leather chair, eyes wide open, beholding visions in the curling smoke
of a cigar against a background of wildly reeling cabin wall.

It was at eleven this morning that the Plate gave us a fiasco. Last
night's was a real pampero--though a mild one. To-day's promised to
be a far worse one, and then laughed at us as a proper cosmic joke.
The wind, during the night, had so eased that by nine in the morning
we had all our topgallant-sails set. By ten we were rolling in a
dead calm. By eleven the stuff began making up ominously in the
south'ard.

The overcast sky closed down. Our lofty trucks seemed to scrape the