“It has been a trying night,” he said gently.
“You had no right to leave your cabin,” she replied—then swiftly disappeared.
Frank looked down the narrow gangway, heard the bang of her door, and, with his head up, and feeling mightily offended, entered his own tiny cabin.
“She might have been civil, at least,” he muttered.
Chapter Four.
A Strange Craft.
Hume had been to the Cape and back; he had also tossed about off the Bristol Channel in a small yacht; but before morning he learnt that the ocean could play more tricks with a ship than he had ever dreamt of in the wildest tossing. He was sleeping on the top bunk, for the sake of the breeze from the open port, and was early awakened by a dream, in which, with the thunder of waters in his ears, he had gone head foremost down a cascade.
Had it been a dream? He sat up, knocking his head against the roof, and in his ears there was the same terrific roar, with a splashing sound, and an unmistakable feeling of dampness. A desperate lurch made him cling to the brass rail; then, as the port dipped, he saw the sky-line obscured by a moving wall, and was almost washed away by a belching funnel of cold water that boomed on to the floor, and rushed over his cabin, taking with it every movable object. As the ship heeled over he struggled, soaked and shivering, with the brass hinge of the port-window, which he thrust in and held there until the ship rolled under again. With the backward swing he worked the screw in, then lurched out from his sodden bed to the floor, inches deep in water, when he groped for the switch and turned on the electric light. His portmanteau coming swiftly out from under the lower bunk, carried him off his feet, and then bounded over his body, while his gun-case rammed him viciously in the ribs.