The morning of the fifth day after the discovery of the fire Paul fixed the Daphne's position one hundred and fifty miles to the south and west of San Francisco.
"Only another day, partner! Maybe an hour may bring a vessel to us!" She had just relieved him at the wheel. Through these five days the Daphne had come driving without sighting a sail: unspoken save by the voice of the northwest wind. Once they had seen the black smoke plume of an outward-bound steamer, but it was too far away for the Daphne's signal of distress to be seen.
Paul seemed to be living by will alone: to be endowed of a force that only death could stay. When he slept the gold woman had no idea. He had relieved her at the wheel every two hours, night and day, but when she was steering she frequently heard him at work in the engine room. From the very first night he had slept beside that engine, kept its fires alive and a stream of steam flowing into the forehold through a pipe led down through the chain locker. He had explained to her that water on a fire like this would have been of as little use as oil: that gases had to be smothered.
Emily sensed that a greater danger menaced them than Paul had revealed. This had been suggested to her when on the second day she had seen him finish a raft built of doors and forecastle bunkboards. But she had learned of the storm not to ask questions. What this man chose to tell he would tell.
Never had he seemed more splendid than as he stood before her this morning telling the Daphne's position, and in the same breath whispering again the belief that had come to him the night before that the steam was choking the beast in the hold. Bare-armed, bareheaded, lithe with a thoroughbred's suppleness, he was, in her sight, an urn of the divine fire from which mankind draws its noblest impulses.
"We'll win through yet, Paul! In justice we must!" she called to him as he went forward.
She saw him come to the galley door a few minutes later with a cup of steaming coffee and, as he ate of a biscuit and drank, he waved to her. He darted inside and a moment later came running aft with a cup for her.
"I've had my coffee, dearheart," she said.
"Half a dozen cups won't hurt you. I put two spoons of sugar in this—sand, save the mark."
With that he was gone from her again. Emily watched him breaking coal out of a corner of the main hatch for use in the donkey. She smiled as she remembered his commentary on the grimness of stealing coal from one end of the ship to make fire to put out coal already afire in the other end. It was the old, old principle of fighting fire with fire in a new, weird form.