He wondered to what extent Horst had been informed of the purport of their voyage when the _Upsal_ was chartered. He could not, certainly, have been left in ignorance--but, on the other hand, he could not well refuse to navigate the ship without losing an employment which, however humble, was assuredly to be coveted by a man in his position. A penniless naval officer had poor prospects in Germany. Bah! (he thought to himself in a sudden revulsion) he was accepting Jensen’s unsupported surmises as though they were reality. The thing was impossible! Another glance at the hard but emotionless face opposite him reassured him. He banished his hyper-dramatic idea in a spurn of self-contempt for his too excitable imagination. Conversation languished. There was no community of thought between the skipper and his passengers, and his presence was a check upon the mutual confidences of the two young men. Meals together were an ordeal escaped from as soon as terminated, and Jensen and Lyngstrand speedily went out on deck again with the murmured allegation that the overhaul of their gear was not yet finished. They did not come together again until some three hours later, when, her white anchor-light hoisted between her masts, the _Upsal_ was pitching at her cable to the heavy swell which rolled down upon her from the darkness of the night. The two young men had been yarning with the chief engineer in the pleasant warmth of the engine-room, when a glance at the clock reminded them that it was the hour when the steward brought biscuits and cocoa to the charthouse. Light-hearted as boys, their unpleasant thoughts of the captain dissipated by the cheerful talk in which they had been indulging, they scrambled up the iron-runged ladder from the warm, oily depths to the black, damp chill of the outer night. In this sea-smelling gloom where the wave-tops ran past them with faintly phosphorescent crests, the unwonted stillness of the ship’s engines was suddenly vivid to their consciousness as she eased and tugged at her anchorage. “Well, here we are!” said Jensen, stopping for a moment to peer around him. “I wonder what lies beneath us?” queried Lyngstrand, developing his comrade’s thought. As he, too, probed the darkness where the cruel waves ran, easy familiars of the night, he had an uncomfortable little mental picture of the _Gloucester City_ foundering, with torn side, into their chill depths--a year ago. What shrieks and cries had hushed, for ever, into the silence which encompassed them? Both shuddered. “Come along,” said Jensen. “Our cocoa will be cold.” At the charthouse door they hesitated for a moment on an indefinable impulse, peeped through the unshuttered window which allowed a broad ray of light to fall across the deck.