Page:Mason--Four corners of the world.djvu/158

 pass striking up on the brasswork of the wheel and the face of the steersman; to nights at sea Strange owed all the spacious moments of his crippled life. But this night was a sacred thing. He was admitted to the band of the young strong men who serve, like a novice into the communion of a church; and his heart sang within his breast as he kept the Boulotte to her course. At a quarter past eleven he rang the telegraph and put the indicator to "slow." Five minutes later he stopped the engine altogether. Four miles away to the north-eastward a light brightened and faded.

"We are there," he said, and he looked out over an empty sea.

Under Slingsby's orders he steamed slowly round in a circle, ever increasing the circumference, for an hour, and then the new hand—who, by the way, was a master gunner—crept aft.

"There it is, sir."

A hundred yards from the port bow a dark mass floated on the sea. The Boulotte slid gently alongside of it. It was a raft made of barrels lashed together.

"We have seen those barrels before, my friend," said Slingsby, his nose wrinkling up in a grin of delight. Before daybreak the work was done. Fifty empty barrels floated loose; there was a layer of heavy oil over the sea and a rank smell in the air.