The conversation, which had been carried on in hoarse whispers, was at this point interrupted by a movement of the little boy. Johnson raised his hand and Winyard crept forward, where he sat like a bronze statue, watching the horizon. It was about four o’clock, as the seamen guessed, when the wind, which had been pretty steady from the south-east, lulled, and then veering northward came on to blow freshly. The men awakened Holdsworth, who went to the helm. Mrs. Tennent, who had been aroused by the withdrawal of the sailor’s shoulder, shivered with the cold and crouched down to hug herself in her clothes. Indeed, the north wind was cold enough; but Holdsworth, observing the woman’s condition, whipped off his coat without a word and buttoned it over her shoulders, silencing her protests by kindly laughter and encouraging words. The change of wind produced a cross sea which drenched the boat and made her movements horribly uncomfortable. The wind increased, bringing up large clouds, each of which was charged with a small rain-loaded squall of its own. The sea rose, and matters began to wear an ugly look. The men close-reefed the sail, and Holdsworth finding that the boat shipped water when on the wind, let her go free; and away they scudded with a breeze growing in force every five minutes astern of them. The utmost vigilance was now needful in steering the boat. The waves were quick and irritable, and broke in noisy surfaces of foam on either gunwale, and from time to time it seemed inevitable that their curling crests must arch themselves clean into the boat and swamp her. Holdsworth parried them with the rudder like a fencer with a foil. His eye was marvellously quick, the movements of his hands delicate and unerring. What the waves were to that small open boat, the seas of the Pacific under a westerly gale are to a full-rigged ship. She sank into hollows half-mast deep, where the air was stagnant, behind and before her black walls of illuminated water, the hinder ones of which, catching her under the stern, raised her with irresistible force to a height that turned her inmates giddy and sick; and there, exposed to the wind, her sail blew out to cracking limits and hurled her madly forward--to sink into a new abysm, to experience another interval of breathless, deadly calm. “May God have mercy upon us!” exclaimed the General, in one of these awful intervals, folding his arms tightly and fixing his eyes on a towering sea rearing astern of them like a hill. But Holdsworth’s voice echoed cheerily: “She is a brave boat, General; and it’s not my intention to let such ripples as these” ... the rest of the sentence was drowned in the hooting of the wind, as one of these “ripples” swung the boat high in the full face of it, and the “ripple” itself broke into an acre of foam under the boat’s bows.