In a couple of hours the deck was piled high with miscellaneous baggage, and a derrick, hurriedly rigged, was hauling up the heavier things out of the bowels of the ship. As they came swinging out of the darkness into the chill gray light, people recognized their belongings with an anxiety hardly allayed by the temporary stowage of their all upon the deck—too palpably a possible half-way station to the bottom of the sea. Gedge’s following was now so great as to be unwieldy. They blocked the narrow gangway, they settled like flies on the freight. He drew off a chosen few, and retired out of the bitter wind to the shelter of the smoke-stack to hold a private session. “If that fellow had some education,” said Governor Reinhart, “he’d be helping to guide the ship of state at Washington.” “He seems likely to guide this ship into trouble enough,” Cheviot answered crisply. “What is he doing now?” Hildegarde asked. “He’s—” Reinhart began and hesitated. Under his breath O’Gorman finished the sentence. “Trying to incite a lot of fools to mutiny.” “What does he want them to do?” “Put the captain in irons.” “What!” “And turn the ship over to the pilot and first officer—that fellow coming off the bridge now.” Hildegarde followed Louis’s eyes and saw they were fixed not on the dapper officer descending, but were on the square figure of the captain standing motionless on the bridge, looking down at the coolies busy as ants about the hold. But he looked, not as if he saw them. The hard face was red and angry. Hildegarde, with her genius for sympathy, divined something in it infinitely miserable, too. “How lonely the man looks,” she said aside to Cheviot. “You can’t be at the head of things and not be lonely.” The words deepened her sense of commiseration. “You don’t think he knows about Gedge’s wild talk?” “Oh, probably.” “I wish he could be reminded he has friends among us as well as enemies.” “I was just going up,” Louis said. “Do you think I might come? Just for a moment?” “Well, if he fires you out you aren’t to complain.” “Complain? No. But I shall still believe it’s a pity that men think whoever is to know the truth about a danger or a difficulty, it mustn’t be a woman. Don’t you see it would be a gain to both sides that we should know?” “Nonsense. It would scare most women and bore the rest. Besides, they’d be in the way.” “If that’s so it’s only because they’ve been kept so ignorant. Louis”—the voice dropped softly—“do you know what I’ve been thinking about often and often?” He waited a moment before he said: “Since we got into the ice?” “Yes.” “I suppose I do.” But he said it so stonily she stopped half-way up the companionway and looked back at him. “I’ve been thinking I should never have known you if I hadn’t come on this journey.” “Oh, found me out, have you?”