On the fifth day out Idaho, called for his early watch, found the boat wallowing in a heavy sea. The wind was not particularly heavy, but it blew steadily from one point of the compass, and the seas were running dark, wind-flecked, and high. The _Sebastopol_, accustomed to the calm of eastern seas, was pitching and rolling heavily. Presently the cargo began to shift. Now, to have the cargo shift is about the most dangerous thing that can happen to a vessel. One never can tell just when the centre of gravity of the mass will be displaced, and when that contingency occurs, the big iron ship will roll over as casually and as easily as a dog before the fire. It takes courage, plenty of courage, to keep such a ship running, especially if you are down by the boilers or in the engine room. You have to be prepared to find yourself lying in a corner somewhere looking up at a ceiling which, strange to say, has a door in it. The _Sebastopol_ leaned away from the wind like a stricken man crouching before a pitiless enemy; the angle of her smokestack more than anything else betraying the alarming list. In her stricken condition, the ship seemed to become more than ever personal and human. Presently her old plates bulged somewhere and she began to leak. The vessel carried a cargo of grain, in these days more than ever a cargo epical and symbolic; a holdful of rich grain, grain engendered out of fields vast as the sea, bred by the fruitful fire of the sun, rippled by the passing of winds from the mysterious hills, grain, symbolic of satisfied hunger, ... victory. A cargo of grain, life to those on land, to those on board, danger and the possibility of a violent if romantic death. The crew, too occupied with the emergency to curse the stevedores, ran hither and thither on swift, obscure errands. And the weather grew steadily worse, the leak increasing with the advance of the storm. Down below, meanwhile, a force of men hardly able to keep their balance, buffeted here and there by the motion of the ship, and working in an atmosphere of choking dust, transferred a number of bags from one side to another. Unhappily, the real mischief was due to grain in bins, and with this store little could be done. And always the water in the hold increased in depth.