Olsen was a taciturn creature, who cared for no one in the world but his half-caste children--bright, large-stomached little creatures, whom he had left playing in the dust in front of his gaily painted wooden house in St. Thomas. For their sakes he put up with his fat, slovenly wife and her swarms of relations of various shades of brown. It was only for the children's sake that he had stuck to the _Spirito Santo_, for it suited him to be able to get home as often as he might, and even when the _Spirito Santo_ did not touch St. Thomas he could always pick up with a mail-packet or a sailing ship of some kind. It was his ambition to send both boy and girl to New York for their education, now that the Civil War had made it possible for anyone with a touch of colour to make good. Therefore he nursed his crazy engines as though he loved them, but he decided that the sooner the accident occurred the better. In the second dog-watch, he, as Lemaire had done the day before, went to Elderkin in the chart-room. He found the captain with an open book in front of him: he was not reading, but making calculations on the margin. He glanced up at Olsen and his tired eyes brightened for a moment. Then: "Ask Mr. Lemaire to come here," he ordered, "and come back yourself." Olsen made his way to the top of the chart-house, where Lemaire was pacing, full of anxiety, and delivered the order. Lemaire came with a mixture of civility and an assumption of confederacy in his manner, but Elderkin took no more notice of it than of Olsen's waiting stolidity. He closed the Bible and confronted the two men. "Well, Olsen," he said, "you were wanting to see me about something?" "It is about this affair," answered Olsen, "there is no good to be got by waiting, sir. I tell you plainly my engines will not stand so very much. And the way she is loaded, if we come up against anything in the way of a sea----" "And you?" asked Elderkin of the mate. "I am sure dat what Olsen say is right. It must be now or never." "It is going to be never," replied Elderkin in his usual soft tones. The two men stared at him, then the quicker Latin flashed into speech. He demanded, with a lapse into Island patois now and again, what the blank blank blank the captain thought he was doing. Elderkin sat through it unmoved. "I will not speak to you as you have just done to me," he began, "because hairy, forsaken Frenchy as you are, you are still a son of God, even as I am. Praise the Lord with me, for He has shown me into what an abyss of sin I had fallen. Do you hear what I say? I am captain aboard this ship, Mr. Lemaire, and I order you to praise God for having delivered us while there is yet time."