Now the boat was to be lowered, and he went to work thus: he cast adrift the gripes which had held the boat steady betwixt the davits, and then he slackened the falls at the bow, belaying the tackle, and then he slackened the falls at the stern, belaying the tackle; and so by degrees the boat sank in irregular jerks to the surface of the water. He sprang on to the bow tackle and descended with the nimbleness of a monkey, with wonderful swiftness unhooked the blocks, and the boat was free. Next he stepped the mast upon which the sail lay furled, then the rudder; then shoved clear and hoisted the small square of lug, and in a few minutes he was blowing away gently into the boundless blue distance, looking all about him with a proud but ghastly smile for a sight of his missing boy, whilst the girl lay like the dead in the bottom of the boat. CHAPTER XII. JULIA CALLS "JOHNNY!" It was about half-past two o'clock in the afternoon and the sun shone hotly. The breeze was a pleasant wind for that boat, and the captain put her dead before it and blew onwards into the boundless distance, squarely seated at the amidship helm, with the white and placid face of the drugged girl at his feet. He would often look at her with a passionate eagerness, and then direct his brilliant eyes over the sea, and his countenance was now shocking with its expression of real madness, charged with the ghastly illumination of his one maniacal belief, that the girl, who was fresh from the sea when he missed his boy, knew where he was and would take him to the child, and then they would return to the ship, and once more the drum would rattle and the whistle awaken the birds in the rigging. Never before in all human tradition of ocean life had fate painted upon the bosom of the deep a picture more wonderful by virtue of its secret and tragic meaning. There would be nothing in the mere scene of a beautiful clipper ship under all plain sail, her canvas hollowing inwards visibly, to all intents and purposes derelict; there would be nothing in the spectacle of a little open boat borne onwards by the humming heart of its swelling square of canvas, steered by a lonely figure, the other being hidden. It might be to a distant eye the flight of a single survivor from a floating pest-house. But it was the story of the thing which makes it so extraordinary that I who am writing pause with astonishment, dismayed also by the lack of the exquisite cunning I need to submit the truth.