The Albatross, bound from Cape Town to Melbourne, had been blown out of her course and south of the Crozet Islands; she was now steering north-west, making towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast, like a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against which the top-gallant stay-sails shewed gull-white in the sun, had the cold blue of the sea and was hung round at the horizon by clouds like the white clouds that hang round the Pacific Trades.

Raft was at the wheel and Captain Pound the master was pacing the deck with Mason the first officer, up and down, pausing now and then for a glance away to windward, now with an eye aloft at the steadfast canvas, talking all the time of subjects half a world away.

It was a sociable ship as far as the afterguard was concerned. Pound being a rough and capable man of the old school with no false dignity and an open manner of speech. He had been talking of his little house at Twickenham, of Mrs. Pound and the children, of servants and neighbours that were unsociable and now he was talking of dreams. He had been dreaming the night before of Pembroke docks, the port he had started from as a boy. Pembroke docks was a bad dream for Pound, and he said so. It always heralded some disaster when it appeared before him in dreamland.

“I’ve always dreamt before that I was starting from there,” said he, “but last night I was getting the old Albatross in, and the tow rope went, and the tug knocked herself to bits, and then the old hooker swung round and there was Mrs. P. on the quayside in her night attire shouting to me to put the helm down—under hare sticks in the docks, mind you!”

“Dreams are crazy things,” said Mason. “I don’t believe there’s anything in them.”

“Well, maybe not,” said Pound. He glanced at the binnacle card and then went below.

Nothing is more impressive to the unaccustomed mind than the spars and canvas of a ship under full sail seen from the deck, nothing more suggestive of power and the daring of man than the sight of those leviathan spars and vast sail spaces rising dizzily from main and foresail in pyramids to where the truck works like a pencil point writing on the sky. Nothing more arresting than the power of the steersman. A turn of the wheel in the hands of Raft would set all that canvas shuddering or thundering, spilling the wind as the water is spilled from a reservoir, a moment’s indecision or slackness might lose the ship a mile on her course. But Raft steered as he breathed, automatically, almost unconsciously, almost without effort. He, who ashore was hopelessly adrift and without guidance, at the helm was all wisdom, direction and intuition.

The wake of the Albatross lay as if drawn with a ruler.

His trick was nearly up, and when he was relieved he went forward; pausing at the fo’c’sle head to light a pipe he fell in talk with some of the hands, leaning with his back against the bulwarks and blown upon by the spill of the wind from the head sails.

An old shell-back by name of Ponting was holding the floor.

“We’re comin’ up to Kerguelen,” he was saying. “Should think I did know it. Put in there in a sealer out of New Bedford in ’82. I wasn’t more’n a boy then. The Yanks used to use that place a lot in those days. The blackest blastedest hole I ever struck. Christmas Island was where we lay mostly, for two months, the chaps huntin’ the wal’uses and killin’ more than they could carry. The blastedest hole I ever struck.”

“I was there in a Dane once,” began another of the crew. “It was time of year the sea cows was matin’ and you could hear the roarin’ of them ten mile off.”

“Dane,” said Ponting, “what made you ship a’board a Dane—I’ve heard tell of Danes. Knew a chap signed on in one of them Leith boots out of Copenhagen runnin’ north, one of them old North Sea cattle trucks turned into a passenger tramp, passengers and ponies with a hundred ton of hay stowed forward and the passengers lyin’ on their backs on it smokin’ their pipes, and the bridge crawled over with passengers, girls and children, and the chap at the wheel havin’ to push ’em out of the way, kept hittin’ reefs all the run from Leith to God knows where, and the Old Man playin’ the fiddle most of the time.”

“That chap said the Danes was a d——d lot too sociable for him.”

Raft listened without entirely comprehending. He had always been a fore-mast hand. He knew practically nothing of steam and he would just as soon have fancied himself a railway porter as a hand on a passenger ship. He was one of the old school of merchant seamen and the idea of a cargo of girls and children and general passengers, not to speak of ponies, was beyond him.

The girls he had mostly known were of the wharf-side. He finished his pipe and went down below—and turned in.

He was rousted out by the voice of the Bo’sw’n calling for all hands on deck and slipping into his oilskins he came up, receiving a smack of sea in his face as he emerged from the fo’c’sle hatch. The wind had shifted and a black squall coming up from astern had hit the ship. More was coming and through the sheeting rain and spindrift the voice of the Bo’sw’n was roaring to let go the fore top-gallant halyards.

Next moment Raft was in the rigging followed by others. The sail had to be stowed. The wind tried to tear him loose and the sheeting rain to drown him, but he went on clinging to the top-gallant mast-stays and looking down he could see the faces of the others following him, faces sheeted over with rain and working blindly upwards.

Ponting was the man immediately below him, and taking breath for a moment and against the wind, Ponting was now yelling out that they had their work cut out for them.

They had.

The top-gallant sail had taken charge of itself, and Raft and Ponting as they lay out on the yard seemed battling with a thing alive, intelligent, and desperately wicked.

The sail snored and trembled and sang, standing out in great hoods and folds, hard as steel; now it would yield, owing to a slackening of the wind, and then, like a brute that had only been waiting to take them by surprise, it would burst out again, releasing itself, whilst the yard buckled and sprang, almost casting them from it.

Then began a battle fought without a sound or cry except the bubbling and snoring of the great sail struggling for its wicked liberty, it shrank and they flung themselves on it, it bellied and flung them back, clinging to the lift they saved themselves, attacking it again with the dumb fury of dogs or wolves on a fighting prey. Twenty times it tried to destroy them and twenty times they all but had it under.

The fight died out of the monster for a moment and Raft had nearly an armful of it in when it stiffened, fighting free of him, owing to Ponting and the other fellow not having made good. They clung for a moment without moving, resting, and Raft glancing down saw far away below the narrow deck driving wedge-like through the foam-capped seas.

Then the struggle began again. The sail, like its would-be captors, seemed also to have taken breath, it held firm, relaxed, banged out again in thunder, developed new hoods and folds as a struggling monster might develop new heads and kinks, and then, all of a sudden when it seemed that no effort was of avail the end came.

The wind paused for a moment, as if gathering up all its strength against the dogged persistency which is man, and in that moment the three on the yard had the sail under their chests beating and crushing the life out of it. Then the gaskets were passed round it and they clung for a moment to rest and breathe.

It was nothing, or they thought nothing of it, this battle for life with a monster, just the stowing of a top-gallant sail in dirty weather, and most likely when they got down the Bo’sw’n would call them farmers for being such a time over it. Meanwhile they clung idly for a moment, partly to rest and partly to look at something worth seeing.

The squall was blowing out, there was nothing behind it and away on the port quarter the almost setting sun had broken through the smother and was lighting the sea.

There, set in a thousand square acres of snowcapped tourmaline, white as a gull and beautiful as grace itself, was running a vessel under bare poles. The two yellow funnels, the cut of the hull, told Ponting what she was. He had seen her twice before and no sailor who had once set eyes on her could forget her.

“See that blighter,” he yelled across to Raft. “Know her?”

“Should think I did, she’s the Gaston de Paree—a yacht—seen her in T’lon.”

Then they came down, crawling like weary men, and on deck no one abused them for their slackness or the time they’d been over their job. The Albatross was running easy and the Bo’sw’n with others was taken up with a momentary curiosity over the great white yacht.

No one knew her but Ponting, who had for several years acted as deck hand on some of the Mediterranean boats.

“I know her,” said he ranging up beside the others. “She’s the Gaston de Paree, a yot—seen her in T’lon harbour and seen her again at Suez, she’s a thousand tonner, y’can’t mistake them funnels nor the width of them, she’s a twenty knotter and the chap that owns her is a king or somethin’; last time I saw her she was off to the China seas, they say she’s all cluttered up with dredges and dipsy gear, and she mostly spends her time takin’ soundin’s and scrabblin’ up shell fish and such—that’s his way of amusin’ himself.”

“Then he must be crazy,” said the Bo’sw’n, “but b’God he’s got a beauty under him—what’s he doin’ down here away?”

“Ax me another,” said Ponting. Raft stood with the others, watching the Gaston de Paris from whose funnels now the smoke was coming festooned on the wind, then he went below to shed his oilskins and smoke.

She had ceased to interest him.