Slowly the sun approached the horizon and the darkness crept over the east. Still not a breath of air moved.
Two long scorching days passed, and still they lay becalmed. Even the swell had subsided, and the ocean resembled a vast sheet of quivering glass. Things began to look serious.
The water was running low. Jack had had to cut down the allowances to half a pint per diem, and the dread torment of thirst was beginning to take hold of them.
The close heat was becoming unbearable, and the air stifling with the damp steaminess of a hothouse.
The castaways lay panting, and though dry and parched within, without they streamed with moisture.
The three whites in their shirt-sleeves, and with ducks or dungarees rolled up to their knees, were tanned as dark as the Kanakas, and their hard-worked muscles strained beneath the shrinking skin, giving their arms and legs the yellow gloss of burnished copper.
Jim tried to whistle for a breeze, but his tongue was too swollen from want of water, and the undaunted boy gave it up with a careless laugh.
"My penny whistle wants oiling," he said.
"I reckons we all want lubricatin' some," observed Broncho. "I shudders when I thinks of all the nosepaint I've put into my system so careless an' easy, without the remotest idees of what you-alls call economy or thrift."