“Ah!” said Mar, gravely, “that was pretty daring; but you may depend it wasn’t in as bad a place as the one I’m talking about. Horrible steep cliffs sheer down to the shore. Boulders piled helter-skelter. Couldn’t see much through the dimness of the sleet and the dazzle of the spray, still, they saw enough to know it wasn’t the harbor they were hoping for. But to get the boat out of that boiling surf alive—no, it wasn’t easy.” Mar caught the first look of keenness that crossed the tear-stained face—the sudden taut aspect of the slim little body, and he knew perfectly well that the modest young navigator before him was saying in his heart, “Ah, now, if _I’d_ been there.” Thus encouraged, Mar went on: “Things had been bad enough out in the open sea, but here you were being driven straight on the rocks, and the wind—you don’t know anything yet about what the wind can do when it tries.” “What kind of fing?” “It cut the top off those great waves as clean as you can slice the peak off a hillock of ice-cream; and the water was hurled at you, not in spray, but in masses, you know—masses that never broke till they struck the men or the boat—except when the wind veered, and then the water masses were flung clean up on the cliffs, as neatly as you could throw a bottle of soda on our roof here and never see a drop spilled till the glass burst on the slates.” Jack nodded and seemed to forget his twirling, though he stood with his body slightly askew, ready to begin again. “They’d never have got out of that boiling caldron alive if the wind hadn’t changed.” Mar wagged his head in a final sort of way, and turned in his revolving chair to pick up a fallen paper. “Is vat all? And vey did get home—” “No, that’s not all, and they didn’t get home. Only one of them got anywhere.” Mar bent his big body slightly forward and clasped his hands round the good knee. The other leg was stretched straight out in front of him, stiff and lifeless looking. “They kept afloat for several hours,” he went on, “only to be wrecked after all, a mile or two beyond an ugly looking cape called Nome.” “Wecked! Were vey weally wecked?” Mar nodded. In an emergency so great Jack did not scruple to turn his back on the stool of penitence. He came and planted himself on wide apart legs, directly in front of Mr. Mar, and stood there waiting. But Mr. Mar seemed to be thinking less about Jack now, and he stared steadily at the hole in the carpet. “What happened to ve little boat?” “The little boat was rapidly converted into little flinders.” “Ven how could ve men get away again?” “That’s what one of the men would have liked somebody to tell him.” “Weren’t vere any people vere on vat land?” “Not a soul.” “Where was ve ovver man?” “He had been washed out of the boat—he—it was hard to say where the other man was.” “Didn’t his fwiend look for him?” “Not just then. The first thing the friend did was to tear up his shirt.” “Gwacious! Was he as mad as vat?”