By the time they were ranged beside the others again, along the fuselage, the anxious pale faces turned to them, the bodies floundering and awash, the colour had gone from the watery world. There was only a brief green streak of twilight where the sun had gone. To the east the waves were black against the tremendous looming purple of the night. Stars were quivering in the enormous rondure of the sky that overhead took on a strange metallic blue and cast upon them a faint luminance that was less than light and only a little less than dark. By it they could see their own dark shapes, the black parallels of the wings. On the black water the white crests flashed and lengthened and disappeared, ghostly in the dark. The waves snarled now as they leaped toward them. The hissing spray stung like thrown pebbles as it struck their blistered, puffy faces. There was a little relief in the darkness, for the sun no longer burned into their eyeballs, but in its place the phantoms of the black lonely water started about them and the blood went thin. “I suppose now”--Mrs. Kinney’s voice came suddenly and a little shrill, from the shadow she had become--“now that it’s dark, nobody can see to pick us up, even if a boat did come?” No one spoke. It was what everyone had been thinking, Ronny was sure. But it had not been spoken before in so many words. Then Bill said simply, “It’s not likely, Mrs. Kinney. But in the morning it will be different. They’ll have heard from Bimini, and the boats will be out sure. We’ve been drifting a bit or they would have found us sooner.” No one spoke again. They set themselves somehow to endure the night. Through the noise of the wind humming and shrieking in the wires and of the waves hissing and slapping against the wood, Ronny could hear few sounds which would indicate that human life was here, clinging perilously to what was almost wreckage. His arm ached dully and continuously as he held it tight over the edge of the cockpit, and his bumped and floating body smarted in places where the skin had been rubbed off. Yet he was growing queerly drowsy. His eyelids drooped and a hazy swimming took the place of thought within his head. He must even have dozed once or twice, for a sharp pain in his elbow roused him or a slap of choking water in the face, and he recognized miserably again, what, for a second of blur, he had forgotten--the lost floundering in the dark, the misery in him and in the figures about him. Once or twice he heard Colonel Kinney speaking gently to his wife and her sharp whimper, as if she, too, had wakened abruptly from a wretched doze, perhaps one in which she had dreamed of warmth and safety and being dry, to the reality of the roaring and sinister dark. Once he heard Gloria swearing to herself, as if unable to stand it any longer, and then stopping abruptly, knowing that it did no good.