They could not talk much—a few sentences here and there, and then long silence. Gerald was exhausted, and besides that his shoulder had suffered a severe wrench. He lay on his back in the bottom of the boat, staring into the gloom; for the moon had gone, and only a shimmer in the atmosphere marked where she sulked, far up above. The lad set his teeth, to keep from crying out with pain and with the dreadfulness of a situation so novel to a boy reared like a hot-house plant.
“I wonder if we will ever get out of this alive?” he thought every now and then. But he answered Philip’s solicitous questions as to his welfare with a tone that nobly feigned ease and hope. Gulping and struggling down any thing like a sob, his prompt “Yes, Philip,” or “No, Philip,” was the only sound that carried any comfort to Touchtone’s heart. “There is no use in asking questions,” he said to himself. “Philip don’t know anymore about what is before us than I do, and I guess he hates to have to tell me so.”
By and by the dragging daylight began to whiten the air. The ocean gradually paled from inkiness to lead-color, and from lead-color to streaked gray, and the gray to a yeasty milk. The dashing waves had given place to a rolling swell on which the boat was lifted, but ever seemed urged forward—whither? Dawn advanced. But such a dawn and such a day! For when the latter had fairly come the fog hung closer than ever. Hour by hour passed with no reasonable gain in the light. Whether the sun was on the one side or the other, before or behind, no man could have told. They were ever surrounded by a dirty greenish haze that made their faces more wan, and that mixed sea and air into one elastic wall, which moved with them as they moved and closed about them as they slid helplessly onward into it.
With the lessening of his strength and the rolling of the boat Gerald became deathly sick. Philip could do little for that. His own arms were stiff; every now and then a chill ran down his body that boded future discomfort if they were not soon delivered from this present one. But he kept to his post. Thanks to his determination, the boat met wave and crest with less and less motion and no mishap, and he said to himself, as he glanced at Gerald’s despairing face, that he “was good for a whole day’s steering, if need be, and a great deal beyond that.” Fortunately, it was not cold, though the stormy chilliness made the early air sharp. In silence, except for a word from Touchtone or a sigh from Gerald, who lay in the bottom of the boat with his eyes closed, they moved onward whither waves and current might shape their sluggard’s course.
Suddenly, about noon, Gerald sat up and declared he felt better. He seemed to have awakened from a stupor of weariness and sickness that had been on him.
“Let me take the tiller,” he pleaded. “Indeed I can, just as well as you. You must be used up.”
“Used up steering nowhere, and with hardly any sea running?” returned Philip, continuing to smile, not a little relieved to see color returned into his protégé’s face, and with something like the usual tone to his voice. “Not a bit! I’m glad if you’re able to move about again, though I must say you’ve not much occasion to do that at present. Sit down there. See how the waves have gone down. O, we’re going to get along bravely presently. You’ll see!”
“But which way are we going?”
“Well, that I can’t positively inform you,” Philip replied, trying to treat lightly the most important worry that now pressed on him, “but no great distance from land, I’m somehow inclined to think. A steamer, or something, may pick us up any hour.”
“But perhaps every hour we are slipping out to sea all the farther?”