Now, our course had been Northward during these exciting hours; but as the day wore on, we set it full N.N.W. Captain Larry alone upon the ship knew my determination to sail from the African coast to Santa Maria in the Azores. I gave him no reason, nor did he ask one. He understood that my purpose was worthy of him and the yacht, and obeyed me unquestioningly. As for the men, they had been engaged for a service which they knew to have some measure of risk in it. A scale of pay beyond anything expected from the master of a yacht tempered their criticism and rewarded their fidelity. This I will say for them, that they were seamen, brave beyond the common, from the burly boatswain Balaam to the beef-faced cabin boy we had christened Nimbles. If they called my ship “a police boat,” I did not resent the term. I think that they had come to have some affection and respect for me; and I would have wagered my fortune upon their loyalty. To such men it mattered little whether our head lay to the North or to the South. The mystery held their interest; they admitted that they had never known brighter days at sea. There remained my poor Timothy McShanus. Good soul, how his heart warmed to the sunshine! And who would have hailed the Timothy of storm and of tempest when upon the second night of our Northward voyage he dressed himself to dine with me in the exquisite little saloon my builders had designed for the _White Wings_? The sea had ebbed down by this time to the stillness of a great inland lake. The moonbeams upon the sleeping water shone with an ethereal radiance of light filtered as it were in a mesh of mirrors. Scarce a breath of wind stirred the awnings of the deck or was caught by the gaping cowls. The yacht moved with that odd gliding motion a turbine engine ensures. We appeared to be running over the unctuous swell as a car upon well-laid rails. The sounds of the night were of steam hissing and valves at a suction and shafts swiftly revolving. The decks trembled at the voice of speed; the movement of the vessel was that of a living, breathing entity, pitted against the majesty of spaces and conquering them. Be sure that Timothy McShanus came in to dinner on such a night as this. He had found his sea-legs and his appetite, and soup, fish, and bird disappeared like one o’clock. To watch him drink ’89 Bollinger from a Venetian tumbler might have inspired even the gods to thirst. Groomed to the last hair upon a time-worn scalp, Timothy would have served well for the model of an Englishman of the ’sixties as Paris used to see him. “By the holy soul of Christopher Columbus, ’tis a rare seaman I am,” he said, as we went up above to take our coffee and cigars under the shelter of the awning. “Ask me to point out the terrestrial paradise, and the yacht _White Wings_ will I name to ye. Ah, don’t talk to me of yesterday. ’Twas a bit of the touch of neuralgia I had, and keeping to me bed for security.”