"'Is that all, Captain, that you have to say?' inquired Lee Fu, his attention still riveted on the course of the sampan.
"Wilbur clutched the rail as if he would tear it from its fastenings. 'A damned sight more, you blackguards, but I'll save that for the authorities!'
"'You feel no thanks for your escape—and there is nothing on your mind?'
"'We shouldn't have needed to escape, if you hadn't gone crazy. Come, let's wind up this farce and get to anchor somewhere. I'm fagged out'
"'No, we are going on' said Lee Fu calmly, making no move to bring the sampan into the wind 'No time for rest, Captain; the voyage is not over'
"'Going on?...' Wilbur's glance swept the sea ahead. Until that moment, I suppose, he thought he had won the battle; he hadn't dreamed that Lee Fu, after such a miraculous escape, would again put us all in jeopardy. He saw that, on the course we were holding, in a very brief interval we should leave the protection of the headland. What lay beyond, it was impossible to discover through the murk. He turned back fiercely; for a moment he and Lee Fu gazed deep into each other's eyes, in a grapple that gave no quarter.
"'Yes, Captain!' said Lee Fu sharply 'We have not yet reached the spot where the Speedwell met her doom. I cannot waste further time in talk. Return to your station, before I am forced to threaten you again.... This is merely an interlude'
IX
"Since that experience, I've many times examined the charts of the region where we were" Nichols went on "But they don't begin to show the whole story. Beyond the middle island, under whose headland we'd found transitory shelter, stretched a larger island, distant some five miles from the other; between them lay the most intricate, extraordinary and terrible nest of reefs ever devised by the mind of the Maker and the hand of geologic change. No wonder the surveys haven't been completed in that region; I defy any man, in the calmest and clearest of weather, to take a craft among those reefs and come out with a whole bottom. Any man, that is, but Lee Fu Chang, who isn't in the service of the Admiralty.
"The outlying fringe of reefs that had broken our first approach ended at the middle island; beyond that, to windward, lay clear water, and the nest of reefs that I've mentioned received the full force of the wind and sea. Five miles of water stretched in mad confusion, a solid whiteness of spouting foam that seemed to generate a hideous illumination, that reflected a dingy glow into the abandoned sky. All the cataracts of the world rolled into one couldn't have matched the awful spectacle. We were still flying through quiet water; but just beyond the point of the middle island the long wind-swept rollers burst in tall columns of spray that shut off the farther view like a curtain, where the reef of rocks stood in an apparently unbroken wall.