"If the fog holds?"
"But if it—what you call—lifts? What then, eh?"
"Through how many storms have you ridden?" the Colonel answered. "Yet if the mast had gone?"
"We had gone! Vraiment!
"That did not keep you ashore."
Augustin cogitated over this for a while. Then, "But we are eight only," he objected. "Myself, nine."
"And two are eleven," Colonel John replied.
"We do not know the ground."
"I do."
The skipper shrugged his shoulders.