Now came the most trying hours of all, when there no longer remained anything possible to do, when hands fell on inaction and bodies were free to feel sore and cold, and minds were vacant of everything but an animal despondency. Olsen lit a fire on the iron floor by the boilers, and here, for the most part, the miserable men crouched during the rest of the day and the following night. Elderkin, after he had slept the sudden and over-powering sleep of the worn-out man, awoke to his first doubts. As long as there had been continuous need for action, that and the stern joy of a fight had shut out everything else for him; now that there was nothing to be done but hoist the inner jib when she came up too much into the wind and lower it when she paid off again, a need so recurring it was almost mechanical, he became as much a prey to inner questionings as his ship was to the winds. What tormented him was the thought that if the _Spirito Santo_ had foundered in this south-west gale all hands would have inevitably been lost, whereas had he kept by his agreement to scuttle her earlier all could probably have been saved. Was he then become a murderer by having decided as he had, and would it have been more righteous to keep on his evil course? Elderkin, to whom for the first time the lives of his men had become of a value other than commercial, was tormented by the thought of the three washed overboard by the great wave; and the curses of the man who had died a few hours after his legs were shattered re-echoed through his mind. It was not so much that these men had met death--Elderkin had too often stared it in the face to think overmuch of that--but that they were cut off in the midst of their sins, with blasphemies on lip and soul. Elderkin's creed allowed of no gracious after-chances, he saw the entities he had known and bullied in the flesh, as having become blind particles of consciousness burning in undying fires. . . . With dawn and a further dropping of the wind, which had been lessening all night, he searched again the pages of his Bible, and he followed the instinctive trail of human nature when he thrust the niceties of values from him and determined to hold by what was right and wrong at the springs of his action. When he went out on to the poop and met the crisp but now friendly wind, saw the glitter of sunshine on peacock waves, that still broke into white crests, but without malignance, he knew that the Lord was on his side. How was it possible he had ever thought otherwise? He must indeed be weak in the ways of grace that his first testing should awake such questionings within him. As the weight of despondency and sick dread fell off him in the cold sunlight, Elderkin flung up his arms and shouted for joy. Lemaire, crawling up, found him on his knees upon the top of the battered chart-house, improvising a paen of thanksgiving.