moderate-minded adventurers to tame the wilder, more frightened and impatient spirits.... That very night the calm vanished. The calm vanished in a wild uprush of clouds and stir of the elements. The heat and savour of brass, the stillness of death, the amazing blue of the sky, the splashed red of sunrise and sunset went away. In their place came darkness and a roaring wind. At first they went under much canvas; it was a drunken delight to feel the spray, to see the crowned woman drink the foam, to hear the whistling and the creaking, to know motion again. But presently they took in canvas.... Twenty-four hours after the first hot puff of air, they were being pushed, bare-masted, as by a giant’s hand over a sea that ran in mountains. The sky was black-purple, torn by lightnings, the rain fell with a hissing fury, the wind howled now, howled too loudly! As the calm would not break, so now the storm would not break. It roared and howled and the water curved and broke over the decks of the Silver Queen. A mast went, the ship listed, there arose a cry. The rain and lightning and thunder ceased, but never the wind and the furious sea and the darkened sky. The Silver Queen was beaten from wave to wave, now smothered in the hollow, now rising dizzily to the moving summit. The waves combed over her, they struck her as with hammers, her seamen cried out that there was sprung a leak, it came to be seen that she might not live. The panic of the calm gave way to that of the storm. And now they cried out wildly that the voyage was cursed, and that God Almighty who had plagued Israel for Achan’s sin was plaguing them for that they kept aboard most vile offenders and rebels such as these! Those that were still for delay kept quarter yet a little longer, but while the wind somewhat lessened, the leak gained, and panic attacked them too. The captain lay ill and out of his head, the mate was no stronger than they who wished clearance made. In a black and wild morning, the livid sky dragging toward them, the sea running high, they lowered a boat and placed in it Aderhold and Joan and Humphrey Lantern. They might, perhaps, have held the last with them, carrying him in irons to Virginia, but when he found what was toward he cursed them so horribly that no wizard could have thought of worse imprecations. They shivered and thrust him into the boat, where he knelt and continued his raving. “Hush!” said Aderhold. “Let us die quietly.”