A crash which shook him bodily brought Paul Lavelle upstanding from the berth in the lounge. The daze of a heavy sleep clung to him. For an instant he could not imagine where he was. He was in utter darkness.  
There was another crash where the spanker boom slammed back from starboard to port again. Then, the Daphne lay over under the impact of a vicious gust of wind.
 
It was the boom which had awakened the sleeper. He leaped out on deck to find himself in a shapeless blackness. There was barely a breeze, but the air was filled with eery noises. Overhead, overside, wherever he turned, he heard them—snarls, whines, whimperings, and the creaking as of huge pinions wheeling. A wolf pack might have been disputing a kill with a horde of vultures.
 
The contrast of this with the exquisite moonlight night upon which Lavelle had closed his eyes was appalling. He groped his way to the wheel, which was in beckets to keep it from rolling, and peered into the compass. An unconscious sigh of thankfulness for the forethought which had made him light the binnacle lamp escaped from him. The Daphne was heading north by east. The gust of wind which had slammed the spanker boom must have come out of the southeast. He faced that point. Another gust confirmed the assumption. He ran into the lounge and struck a match. The silver watch lay on the chart table. It said 1 o'clock. He had not returned for this, but to see the barometer. It stood at 30:00; just where it had hung all day.
 
But what he had not discovered by daylight he now saw in the flickering match light. The barometer hand and the indicator were caught together. His heart went cold, he lit another match and struck the bulkhead with his clenched fist. The blow jarred the hand and indicator apart. The delicate wisp of blue steel quivered at 30:00 for a breath. Then, it began to fall. It reached 29:10 and clung. Even as the match went out it recorded 29:00 and was still falling.
 
He had seen a mercurial barometer go from 29:30 to 26:03 in the Kau Lung. That was a world's record!
 
Despair seized him. What could he and a lone woman do in a brute of a vessel like this—undermanned even with twenty men before the mast?
 
"God Almighty, what have I done?" he cried aloud in agony of spirit.
 
A smash of wind from the south'ard was the answer he got.
 
He gritted his teeth and flung a curse at the sea:
 
"I'll beat you—you and all your foulness! You sneak!" he yelled at the blackness.
 
He dropped down through the companionway, calling "Emily! Emily!"
 
There was no answer. She was asleep, poor girl, he thought. That was why she had let him oversleep; why she had not called him when it turned black.
 
"Emily! Emily! Where are you?"
 
Echoes answered him. Running forward, he saw the light beaming from the derelict's room. As he reached the doorway he beheld the girl standing beside the old man's berth, a book in her left hand and her right uplifted.
 
"So help me God," the derelict was solemnly repeating after her.
 
As the last word came from his lips he discovered Lavelle.
 
"'Th' Prince'!" he cried and fell back, a hand at his brow in salute.
 
The book dropped from Emily's hand. She swayed where she stood. She had fought and won a battle as brave as any field of war ever knew. Yet an angry glance, which struck her and cut like a whiplash, was her reward.
 
"Why didn't you answer me when I called?" Lavelle demanded, but paused not on an answer. "Get aft to that wheel! Go! Run! Keep her nor'east until I can get back to you!"
 
With that he was gone from her. Like a soldier, without questioning, without a word, she went aft to do what this man had bidden.
 
The fire under the donkey was dead when Lavelle got to the engine room. It would take an hour to make steam. The barometer and his sea wisdom told him that he had only minutes to prepare.
 
Whatever the battle was to be it was with his own hands that Paul Lavelle must fight it. With this realization a terrific rage filled him. It was fed with each breath that he snatched out of the blackness. The sea was a personal enemy. Thus men who deal with it in long intimacy come to visualize it. The sea was a sneak—a coward; always striking below the belt.
 
Lavelle had squared the yards before he had gone aft in the evening, leaving the braces slack so as to cast the Daphne on the most advantageous tack at the first coming of a breeze. He had expected a wind from the north and west. Here it was out of the southeast. The gusts which had roused him had struck the bark on the starboard quarter. It had brought her to on that side. She was now forging ahead on the starboard tack. As she rode she was under a double-reefed foresail, reefed upper and lower fore and main topsails, foretopmast-staysail, and inner or boom jib. The growing breeze lifted the slack out of the starboard or weather braces. The lone worker in the darkness led the falls of the lee braces to the main deck capstan and hove them in. And wherever he went he belayed rope and line with a double hitch. There was a finality about everything he did.
 
He set the maintopmast-staysail, hoisting it with the capstan. He would ride her with that if it should be possible to heave her to after he had located the bearing of the storm's center.
 
He ran aft only to stop at the entrance to the alleyway. He remembered the boom jib.
 
"Too much headsail with a reefed spanker," he muttered.
 
He sped forward again, found the jib halyards, and let them go. As a last touch of precaution he bent the jib downhaul to the foretopmast-staysail clew as a preventer sheet.
 
Aft he sped again and through the cabin. A faint murmur came to him as he ran by the derelict's room.
 
Out of the pile of slop-chest staff in the after cabin he snatched an oilskin coat and sou'wester. He struggled into them as he climbed through the companion way into this lounge.
 
A flash of a match brought the barometer's dial out of the blackness. 28:03!
 
An impulse to smash it for its trickery seized him. He forbore and plunged outside. He thrust Emily away from the wheel. As he bent to peer into the binnacle she shuddered at the rage which distorted his face. Thus men, she thought, must look in battle with the blood lust upon them. There was something primordial, relentless, about him. He was the elemental man, sensate that a kill was at hand.
 
The Daphne was heeling over, further and further, under the onslaught of the rising wind.
 
The roughness with which Lavelle had pushed Emily away from the wheel started a demon of resentment to life in her. Her arms were aching. It had seemed that the wheel must draw them from their sockets while she was alone. Steering the Daphne while Lavelle had been forward had not been the tame task of the afternoon.
 
She stood trembling where this man had shoved her. She could have struck him.
 
"Get below! Close every port—every door! Jump! Then, come back and light that lamp in the lounge!"
 
Anger swept her at his brutal tone. Tears blinded her. They were the tears of a rage of which she had never believed herself capable, oho could not move.
 
"Go—on!" he yelled.
 
A furious squall twisted the two words into a shriek.
 
A sea slopped over the weather quarter and ran hissing across the deck to leeward. It sucked hungrily at the gold woman's feet and ankles. At its touch her rage grew, but passed from the man at the wheel to the sea. It was the sea that he hated, not her. It was the sea that she hated. It was the sea that had spoken through him. The sea was his enemy. It became in that moment personal to her—her enemy.
 
Thus the spirit of Lavelle reacted upon Emily Granville's. Could she have seen her face at that instant she would have discovered in it the same elemental, the same primitive passion, which had shocked her in his.
 
The girl ran from the deck and below.
 
Lavelle saw her when she returned and lit the lamp in the lounge. She wore a long oilskin. A sou'wester covered her head. Out of the tail of his eye he caught her staring at the barometer. He noted it with a thought that she had "some sense."
 
She came out to him and had to press her lips against his ear to make him hear her message.
 
"Everything—closed—be—low! Barom—28:00!"
 
That was a fall of three-hundredths of an inch in less than ten minutes!
 
The Daphne was in a trap. Somewhere near her—somewhere in the southern quadrants of the compass between the east and the west—the center of a storm was bearing down upon her. Whether the barometer was lying or telling the truth was of little moment now. Lavelle knew he could not be mistaken in the signs of a revolving storm. He knew the meaning of the wolf-like noises and the wing creakings in the air; the oily, sooty, sight-killing blackness. But one sign was absent and, even as he noted this, it appeared—a sickening, brick-red coloring which cuts the eyes acridly like hay smoke. It diffused itself through the blackness without lessening the night's impenetrability. With its coming the wind veered quickly from the S.S.E. into the south. By the law of storms this change told the lone man arrayed against the sea that the center was bearing upon the Daphne eight points to the right, or out of the S.S.W. The bark was trapped in the storm's advancing or dangerous semicircle. He could not heave her to now. There was but one thing to do: Run. Let the storm overtake the bark and catch her in its vortex and—the sea must win. It depended alone on the Daphne's worthiness and the hands and brain of the man at her helm to beat it.
 
With a full-manned ship the thing to do now was heave to. The enraged man laughed to himself at the thought of his trying to do this alone.
 
By half-past two the wind had veered into the S.S.W. and was blowing a whole gale. Taking it broad over the starboard quarter the Daphne was fleeing northeast. At times her helmsman was sure she was lifting free of the mauling waters and hurtling through space. Again he felt that she was bound headlong toward the quiet ooze; that no vessel could withstand the onslaughts of wind and brine which were being rained upon her. But never his rage at the sea grew less. It burned in him like a living fire; it robbed him of all sense of fatigue.
 
Emily, sitting in the lounge and watching the barometer for any change, saw the silver watch mark the hour when the day should have been breaking. But no light rifted the blackness outside. The barometer hand clung quivering at 28:00! The Daphne's master—yes, her master, too—had told her she must rest as much as she could. Not for her own sake, but the battle's; that was his reason. "Because I may want to use you!" was what he had yelled when she had put her ear up to his lips.
 
When the watch said six o'clock and there came no day, Emily suddenly realized what a time had passed since Paul had taken the wheel from her hands—four hours and a half. Not a bite had crossed lips in eleven hours. It was impossible to get forward to the galley. As she admitted this she remembered the canned provisions in the alleyway stateroom opposite the derelict's. She recalled also the flour and biscuit barrels in the starboard alleyway stateroom.
 
The gold woman went caroming down the companionway and through the reeling saloons. The din of an hundred forges filled them. The derelict's light was giving a last flicker. Daniel McGovern slept. As the lamp went out Emily discovered her book on the floor and picked it up. She put it on a shelf in the storeroom and fled with three cans which she felt out of the darkness. She carried these up into the lounge. One of the cans held corn—the others tomatoes. She dropped below again and groped to the pantry. She was seeking water. There wasn't a drop in the tank. The discovery staggered her. The man at the wheel must drink. An idea of a substitute flashed into her mind. The tomatoes would serve for food and drink. She located a hook under the china racks............