Every two hours a sailor peered from the forecastle. Watching his opportunity, leaving those behind him to close the door, he sprang to the deck. Now running a few steps, now desperately clinging to the wire-tight life line, now leaping high into the rigging to escape the raging sea, he battled a slow way to the wheel; whence the helmsman whom he relieved made an equally precarious passage to the forecastle. It was midday when Alf Jukes opened the forecastle door. Unlike the others, he did not hesitate, or pause to scrutinize the chances of the deck. Though in the past two days no man aboard had slept, there was no sign of weariness about him. As he opened the door he looked with a casual but comprehensive glance to the gale-whipped and snow-laden sky. Then, stepping to the waist-deep smother of the forward deck, he turned and deliberately banged the door behind him. Head unbowed, gaze straightforward, light hands upon the rigid life line, he strode surefooted through the tempest’s rage. When an insweeping sea completely submerged him, the mate, who was watching from by the helmsman’s side, made for the chart room and bellowed to the skipper. Jukes’s head and shoulders reappeared as the skipper leaped out to the poop deck. The groan of the ship’s hull, the creak and outcry of a hundred straining blocks, the clack of chains and parrals, were inaudible. Had the three masts simultaneously splintered and gone over the side, not a sound would have been heard. The skipper and mate looked amusedly into each other’s faces. Alf Jukes’s shoulders, his gripping hands, his arms, the every motion of his entirely reckless body, appeared as the limbs and motions of a gambolling schoolboy. By the toss of his chin, by the shake of his head, by the partings and closings of his stubble-surrounded lips, the universe might observe that Jukes, on his way to relieve the wheel, was singing. Pointing to the helmsman, the skipper yelled an order into the mate’s ear. The mate nodded. Waylaying the man, the mate dragged him into the chart room. So ordered by mate and skipper, the exhausted helmsman sought shelter in the chart house instead of attempting to reach the forecastle. When sailors looked from the forecastle door to see what was become of Jukes, or of the man whom he had gone to relieve, it was to see the mate gesticulating to them to go back; voicelessly ordering them to remain where they were. Afternoon passed, and no man ventured to the wheel’s relief. Toward dusk the wind fell, its uproar ending abruptly--as if a multitude of yelling maniacs had leaped from a precipice edge to instant extinguishment. The crests of the sea died down. The horizons widened. For a little while gray ocean rolled under gray sky. Snow fell. The horizons were blotted out.