To all of those advances the man answered with smiles only. He was very courteous, extremely good-natured, but beyond the ring of silence which he had drawn about himself, he would not or could not go.
Everson was little surprised, although he was mightily angered, when, on the third day following the death of MacKechnie, he was waited upon by a delegation of his sailors with a demand that the stranger be sent from the ship. They did not ask his death—merely that he be set adrift in one of the cruiser's small boats. A sea was running in which such a craft could not survive for two minutes.
Shamefacedly, but sullenly, the men listened to the stern rebuke of their commander. When they had left him reluctantly—and their ears must have tingled to his opinions of their superstitions—Everson redoubled his precautions for the safety of the stranger. The lieutenant was morally certain that at the first opportunity that should offer, an "accident" would befall the man from the sea.
Abruptly as it had struck, the storm of wind subsided. It was succeeded by a torrential downpour of rain. The cruiser was left tossing on a choppy sea. Dead ahead to the south was land—what land, no one on the ship could say. A scant five miles away it loomed up before them through the mists and the driving rain, a long and towering coastline, the peaks of its frowning cliffs almost touching the low-rolling clouds.
In this, the first respite from many hours of perils, Lieutenant Everson at once set about the task of repairing his crippled ship.
Then the crown was placed upon the work of calamity.
Lashed no longer by the flail of the tempest, the Minnetonka was laid to. Hope returned to those who rode upon her. Those who gathered on her decks were almost gay again.
For the first time in many days the two Sardanians came up from their cabin. The Lady Memene had proved a poor sailor, and in her deathly illness that came of the buffeting of the ship, Minos never had left her side, but had nursed her with all the tenderness of a woman. The king remembered well a time, not long before, when he had lain near death, and her soft hands had soothed him, and her care had kept the spark of life within him.
It was nearly noon. Chatting of their experiences in the storm, and laughing at their appearance in the oilskins which they wore against the rain, a little group gathered on the forward deck of the cruiser. Almost it seemed that the hand of fate collected and placed them there. Polaris Janess and Rose Emer, the Sardanians, old Zenas Wright, and Ensign Willis Brooks, a happy-go-lucky youth of large dimensions and an inexhaustible supply of good spirits, who was the second in command on the Minnetonka, made up the party.