"Let's bring her round," he shouted and heard his voice hoarse and loud. Wyndham signed agreement, they turned the wheel, and the crew ran about the deck. She came round and a few minutes afterwards headed out to sea, lurching slowly across the swell that now rolled and broke with crests of foam. The sky had cleared, but not far off an ominous rumble came out of the gloom astern. "We'll wait for daybreak before we make sail," Wyndham remarked. "You can get below. My watch has begun." "I suppose you were with me on the boom?" "I was on the boom," said Wyndham. "Somebody else was near." "Do you imply you didn't know whom it was when you held me up?" "Oh, well," said Wyndham, laughing, "it's not important. Suppose I had grabbed a Krooboy who was falling? Do you imagine I ought to have let him go? Anyhow, we helped each other. I don't expect I'd have reached the deck if I had been alone." Marston said no more. One felt some reserve when one talked about things like that. He looked to windward, and seeing the night was calm, went below. CHAPTER VI THE MIDDLE PASSAGE Marston lounged with languid satisfaction on a locker in the stern cabin. He had borne some strain and his body felt strangely slack although his brain was active. The cabin was small and very plain, because the yacht had been altered below decks when she was fitted for carrying cargo. Moisture trickled down the matchboarded ceiling, big warm drops fell from the beams, and a brass lamp swung about as she rolled. Marston, however, knew this was an illusion; the beams moved but the lamp was still. There were confused noises. Water washed about inside the lurching hull, although a sharp clank overhead indicated that somebody was occupied at the pump; water gurgled, with a noise like rolling gravel, outside the planks. Timbers groaned, a seam in the matchboarding opened and shut, and a dull concussion shook the boat when her bows plunged into the swell. The swell was high, although the wind had dropped. Marston knew these noises and found them soothing. They belonged to the sea, and he loved the sea, although he had not long since fought it for his life. Now the strain was over, he felt the struggle with the tornado had braced and steadied him. In the tropics, it was the land he did not like. Perhaps he was getting morbid, for after all he had not seen much of the African coast and yet it frankly daunted him. His confused recollections were like a bad dream; muddy lagoons surrounded by dreary mangroves from which the miasma stole at night, hot and steamy forests where mysterious dangers lurked, and rotting damp factories from which the burning sun could not drive the shadow that weighed the white man down. Marston was not imaginative, but he had felt the gloom.