That night Raft and the girl took it in turns again to keep watch on deck. They might just as well have gone below for all the trouble the crew could have given them. These gentry had fought bitterly because they had been attacked. Raft had frightened them. There is a form of bravery which one might liken to inverted terror. Rats shew it when they are cornered, and so do men. They had seen their boss killed with a blow and the destroyer hurling himself on them and, though they were peaceable men, they fought. These same peaceable men, be it understood, would, all the same, have murdered a human being for profit could they have done so with reasonable safety.

When the girl came on deck in the morning, after her watch below, she found the deck busy and Raft with his hands in his pockets leaning against the port bulwarks and watching the busy ones.

“They’re in a thundering hurry to get out,” said Raft. “That chap,” pointing to a “chink” that seemed a cut above the others and was evidently the mate, “has been pointing to the sky and out there beyond the bay. They seem to smell bad weather coming. I nodded my head to him and he’s working the hands now for all they’re worth.”

“The wind is blowing from the land,” said the girl.

“Yes,” said Raft, “it’ll take us out without towing, unless it changes.”

The hatch cover had been put on and the boat brought to the davits, some of the crew were up aloft scrambling about like monkeys, others were making ready to haul on the halyards and a fellow was unlashing the wheel. There was not a face in all the crowd that did not bear the signature of Anxiety writ on parchment.

The fear of weather, the fear of Kerguelen, and the fear of that bay, which was evidently haunted by evil spirits, drove them like a whip.

The mainsail was set to a chorus like the crying of sea fowl and the foresail and jib. The tide coming in held the barque to a taut anchor chain with her stern to the beach and the wind ready to take her. The mate was at the wheel and now from forward ought to have come the sound of the windlass pawls and the rasp of the rising anchor chain. It didn’t. From the group of Chinese collected there came, instead, a clang followed by a splash.

“Why, the beggars have knocked the shackle off the chain,” cried Raft. “Lord bless my soul, never waited to raise the mud hook?”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“Sure to have a spare one,” answered he, “but it gets me, that’s Chinee all over, they’re rattled.”

“Look!” she cried, “we’re moving!”

The cliff’s were beginning to glide landward and the bay’s mouth to widen, sea-gulls flew with them screaming a challenge, and the guillemots lining the cliff ledges broke into voice, echoes and guillemots storming at them as they went.

Then the sea opened wide under the grey breezy day and the great islands shewed themselves away to the east. To the west and the north all was clear water.

Raft and the girl walked to the after-rail and looked at the coast they were leaving; it seemed horribly near and the great black cliffs only a gunshot away. If the infernal wind of Kerguelen were to arise and blow from the north even now they might be seized and dashed back on those rocks, but the south-east wind held steady and the cliffs drew away and the coast lengthened and new cliffs and bays disclosed themselves, till they almost fancied they could see, away to the east, the great seal beach where the remains of the dead man lay in the cave and where the great sea-bulls were without doubt taking their ease on the rocks.

And now came the last call of Kerguelen, the voice of the kittiwakes:

“Get-away—get-away—get-away.”

Raft, as they stood and watched, put his arm over the shoulder of the girl and as she held the great hand that had saved her and brought her so far towards safety her mind, miles away, kept travelling the long road from the caves.

“I’m thinking of the bundle and all the poor things in it,” said she, “it will lie there forever on the beach, waiting to be picked up—it’s strange.”

“I was thinkin’ the same thing myself,” said Raft, “and the old harpoon I licked that chap across the head with.”