Trembling all over, Madden gained the barrel and stepped through a niche¹ in its side. He stared through the brilliant, hot colors, but no rushing horde² of monsters met his eyes.  
"Which way?" he asked breathlessly.
 
Caradoc looked around at him in uncomprehending misery³. There was just room for the two in the barrel. Smith seemed to put his mind to Madden's question with an effort.
 
"Which—what did you say?"
 
"Which way?"
 
"What do you mean?"
 
"The dragons, man, the dragons!"
 
"Dragons—right here!" Smith beat his broad chest, then waved his long arms about. "Everywhere—don't you smell it?"
 
The idea of smelling dragons confused the American. "Smell what?"
 
"The whiskey!" shivered Caradoc. "I came up here to get away from it."
 
"Oh—so you didn't see—I understand!"
 
"It's tantalizing—horrible!" he shivered again, as if the superheated air chilled him.
 
The American's own foolish fancies vanished in the face of his friend's real trouble. Caradoc had met a dragon more terrible than the Sargasso could conjure⁴ up, and its fangs⁵ were in his heart. His flight to the crow's nest had been an effort to escape its fury, but it had followed him there. Leonard put a hand on his friend's shoulder. He was at a loss what to say. Indeed there was nothing to say.
 
"Habit—queer thing, Leonard—I thought I was all right."
 
"Yes?"
 
"You see, in college I used to take an alcohol rub-down after my bouts⁶, and a drink. And now, after my fight at noon—smelling this—you don't know how it brings it back, appetite, recollections, everything——" he waved his hands hopelessly again.
 
"Don't think of it. Put your mind on something else."
 
Caradoc gave a short mirthless laugh. "Stand in a fire—and consider the lilies?"
 
"We've got to consider how we'll ever get out of here, if we can't run this tug⁷'s engines..."
 
"We're stuck! We're stuck!" declared the Englishman miserably⁸. "I don't see why I don't go down and be a hog⁹ again... we'll finally starve... Somehow I had a mind to die sober... God knows why I ever came on such a junket."
 
"Starve nothing. We'll get out somehow. We can fish and eat seaweed and distill¹⁰ our own water. I can make a still. And you'll get over that appetite. Bound to—can't last always."
 
Smith relapsed into silence, staring over the dying colors of the sea. Madden tried to think of simple remedies to abate¹¹ a drunkard's appetite for alcohol. He had heard of apples, lemon juice, but both were as unobtainable as the gold cure itself.
 
"How long have you been like this?" he asked at last.
 
"Been bad two or three years. Drank some all my life. My governor taught it to me when I was a baby. Then when I got older if I went too far he kicked. Naturally I intended to stop in time, till I slipped in deep."
 
Leonard nodded understandingly. "It always gets a nervous high-strung fellow. The better stuff you are the harder it hits you."
 
Caradoc stared moodily¹² seaward as he continued his recollections.
 
"The governor kept warning me. I don't believe he'd ever have kicked me out, but he died. Then they cashiered me—took my commission—and my family let me go, too... Well, I can't blame 'em."
 
"Your commission—in the army?"
 
"Navy."
 
"What were you?"
 
"Second lieutenant¹³."
 
Madden looked at his friend curiously¹⁴. Here was a queer pass for an English naval¹⁵ officer. This revelation explained a good deal about Smith, his autocratic manner, his many-sided education, his emotion at leaving England. It even explained why he had expected Malone to place him in charge of the dock.
 
"Is there any hope of getting back in?" asked Leonard sympathetically.
 
"Instauration! Never knew of such a thing in our navy. If I ever get out of here I'll go in trade somewhere."
 
"In South America?"
 
"I had British Honduras in mind, or Canada. I'd like to keep in the Empire."
 
A noise below interrupted the conversation. The two youths looked down. The deck plan of the tug lay flat and empty save for the inert¹⁶ form of Gaskin. The noise came from inside the cabin and arose to a shouting. It was a drunken ribald sound. A suspicion flashed on Leonard's mind.
 
"Those pigs below are wasting the stores," he declared.
 
"They ought to be stopped."
 
"I couldn't stop them without a fight. They were about to court martial¹⁷ me when they happened to think of something else."
 
Caradoc stared down in the direction of the noise, "I might talk them into sense if Greer isn't drunk and wanting to fight again."
 
"He said he never drank—I don't know."
 
Caradoc nodded, "I'll go down and send them forward," he asserted with conviction, and started to climb out of the barrel.
 
Madden looked at the Englishman with a certain apprehension¹⁸, "Caradoc, if you go down there where they are drinking, won't you——"
 
"No, I'm not going to drink."
 
"It will be a temptation."
 
"I have myself in hand now. This talk has done me good. No, I'm all right." He swung out of the barrel and started down the ratlines.
 
Leonard watched him anxiously, not at all sure of the outcome of his mission, not at all sure that the hot smell of rum in the galley¹⁹ would not again overcome his resistance.
 
The sun was just dipping into the sea and its last light spread out of the west to the zenith like a huge red-gold fan. Purplish shadows had already begun to dim the tug and dock and ocean.
 
Fifteen or twenty degrees above the sunset shone a pale crescent moon in the burnished²⁰ sky. The sight of the moon somehow cheered Madden. He recalled a childish superstition²¹ that it was good luck to see the new moon clear. At any rate, as the sky darkened, the clear new moon brought Leonard comfort and renewed hope.
 
With a grateful feeling of the providence²² of an Almighty²³ that hung out moon and stars, the youth glanced around the darkening horizon and presently observed a tiny light far to the south. He stared at it quite surprised, and then he chanced to see a star just above it. It was the reflection of Sirius in Canis Major.
 
The beam of a star must lead any thoughtful soul into endless reveries. Beneath its calm and infinite light, all human troubles fade to the brief complaining of a child in the night. Death becomes a small, unfeared thing, and life itself, the trail of a finger writing an unknown message upon water.
 
Filled with such musings, the American noted²⁴ with surprise that the light on the sea which he had fancied to be the reflection of Sirius was moving. It was not the reflection of a star.
 
It was a light moving in the gathering²⁵ darkness.
 
What sort of light could it be? A Will o' the Wisp? A Jack²⁶ o' Lantern, some phosphoric phenomenon rising in the exhalations of rotting seaweed?
 
Ten minutes before, his excited imagination would have conjured²⁷ up hydras and dragons; now he scrutinized²⁸ the mysterious illumination unexcitedly. It winked²⁹ out occasionally, then presently reappeared. But it did not move in an aimless fashion, after the manner of gaseous³⁰ or electrical phenomena³¹. It pursued a straight line toward the Vulcan. That was why Madden had not observed its movement sooner.
 
Although it had crept only a little way down from the horizon, the wondering boy could discern its progress plainly among the dark masses of seaweed that blotched the graying water. The light was moving toward the Vulcan and at a high rate of speed.
 
As he watched it, the enigmatical light suddenly disappeared. The youth blinked his eyes, looked again. It was gone. Then he became a little uncertain whether or not he had ever observed any such phenomenon. He glanced down on the dark deck and could faintly discern the form of the cook.
 
"G............