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she must surely be dismasted. With that their enterprise was at an end,
and they themselves bound prisoners to the very evidence of their crime.
The greatness of the peril and his own alarm sufficed to silence him.
Pride, wrath, and shame raged without issue in his mind; and he shut his
teeth and folded his arms close.
The captain sat in the boat to windward, bellowing orders and insults,
his eyes glazed, his face deeply congested; a bottle set between his
knees, a glass in his hand half empty. His back was to the squall, and
he was at first intent upon the setting of the sail. When that was done,
and the great trapezium of canvas had begun to draw and to trail the
lee-rail of the Farallone level with the foam, he laughed out an empty
laugh, drained his glass, sprawled back among the lumber in the boat,
and fetched out a crumpled novel.
Herrick watched him, and his indignation glowed red hot. He glanced to
windward where the squall already whitened the near sea and heralded its
coming with a singular and dismal sound. He glanced at the steersman,
and saw him clinging to the spokes with a face of a sickly blue. He saw
the crew were running to their stations without orders. And it seemed
as if something broke in his brain; and the passion of anger, so long
restrained, so long eaten in secret, burst suddenly loose and shook him
like a sail. He stepped across to the captain and smote his hand heavily
on the drunkard's shoulder.
'You brute,' he said, in a voice that tottered, 'look behind you!'
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