"If" again. The wind did not keep on. Either the pole-star, and the dipper, and all the rest of them, had rebelled and were drifting westward,--and so it seemed; or this steady southwest gale was giving out; or, as I said before, we had come into the sweep of a current even stronger, pouring from the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean full up the Gulf of Tarentum. Not ten minutes after the skipper spoke, it was clear enough to both of us that the boat must go about, whether we wanted to or not, and we waked the other boy, to send him forward, before we accepted the necessity. Half asleep, he got up, courteously declined my effort to help him by me as he crossed the boat, stepped round on the gunwale behind me as I sat, and then, either in a lurch or in some misstep, caught his foot in the tiller as his father held it firm, and pitched down directly behind Battista himself, and, as I thought, into the sea. I sprang to leeward to throw something after him, and found him in the sea indeed, but hanging by both hands to the gunwale, safe enough, and in a minute, with Battista's help and mine, on board again. I remember how pleased I was that his father did not swear at him, but only laughed prettily, and bade him be quick, and step forward; and then, turning to the helm, which he had left free for the moment, he did not swear indeed, but he did cry "Santa Madre!" when he found there was no tiller there. The boy's foot had fairly wrenched it, not only from his father's hand, but from the rudder-head,--and it was gone! We held the old fellow firmly by his feet and legs, as he lay over the stern of the boat, head down, examining the condition of the rudder-head. The report was not favorable. I renewed the investigation myself in the same uncomfortable attitude. The phosphorescence of the sea was but an unsteady light, but light enough there was to reveal what daylight made hardly more certain,--that the wrench which had been given to the rotten old fixtures, shaky enough at best, had split the head of the rudder, so that the pintle hung but loosely in its bed, and that there was nothing available for us to rig a jury-tiller on. This discovery, as it became more and more clear to each of us four in succession, abated successively the volleys of advice which we were offering, and sent us back to our more quiet "Santa Madres" or to meditations on "what was next to best." Meanwhile the boat was flying, under the sail she had before, straight before the wind, up the Gulf of Tarentum.