"Are you arraigning my judgment?" she asked.
"No, but what I said is quite true," he continued seriously. "You can take a woman or girl or boy and in one trick at a wheel teach them to steer better than men who have spent a lifetime at sea."
Emily got that pleasure out of the tasks in which she helped which comes to one working under the direction of another who knows what he is about. Nothing seemed too hard; nothing seemed hard enough. The will of the man was inspiring. As she watched him climbing aloft or dropping below along a shroud or backstay it seemed impossible to believe that he had been down and helpless but a few hours before.
The moon came to light their work. By about 10 o'clock they had bent a new foresail, a new spanker, and new boom jib.
"That much will give us another little lease on this world," Paul said as he called quits for the night. "To-morrow morning we'll get a couple more rags on her, after some fashion."
But his work was not done. The while Emily prepared a snack of supper he went aft and took two stellar observations. The reckoning that they gave him was, indeed, startling. The Daphne was five hundred and eighty-five miles northeast of her last position! The navigator could hardly believe his eyes. He took a third set of observations. The result was the same. There had been times during the storm when he had realized that the Daphne was driving with terrific speed. But he had anticipated nothing like this. Yet in this moment the sight of her clean clipper underbody came to him as he had seen it the morning he and the gold woman swam out from the Isle of Hope. Allowances for the distance made from the first noon until the time the storm had struck the Daphne and of her drift all that day gave him the wonderful speed average of more than sixteen knots an hour while the storm lasted. Still doubt lingered until he drew out of his memory a day's work of the famous clipper Flying Cloud—433¼ statute miles from noon to noon.
The Daphne, by this reckoning, was lying in the great circle sailing track of vessels bound from the Japan coast toward San Francisco and Puget Sound. All thought of trying to make the Hawaiian Islands left him. The California coast lay less than three thousand miles to the eastward. The prevailing winds in this track from then on would be from the west and northwest. The Daphne, with fair weather, should be able to make this distance in a month. If no vessel should rescue them they could win home in that time.
"Oh, you Daphne packet!" he cried in glee as he hurried forward to tell Emily the good news. He went with a snatch of "The Dreadnaught" bursting from him.
"'With everything drawing aloft and alow
She's a Liverpool packet! Lord God see her go!'"
Emily was on the point of going to the galley door to call him when she caught that bit of heart-lifting song. A wild, compelling note of the sea was in it.