Page 277 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

So another day and night passed, and the eleventh
morning saw the boat yet alive, rolling in the trough of the
same deserted sea. The four exiles lay in her almost without
breath.
All at once Dawes uttered a cry, and, seizing the sheet,
put the clumsy craft about. ‘A sail! a sail!’ he cried. ‘Do you
not see her?’
Frere’s hungry eyes ranged the dull water in vain.
‘There is no sail, fool!’ he said. ‘You mock us!’
The boat, no longer following the line of the coast, was
running nearly due south, straight into the great South-
ern Ocean. Frere tried to wrest the thong from the hand of
the convict, and bring the boat back to her course. ‘Are you
mad?’ he asked, in fretful terror, ‘to run us out to sea?’
‘Sit down!’ returned the other, with a menacing gesture,
and staring across the grey water. ‘I tell you I see a sail!’
Frere, overawed by the strange light which gleamed in
the eyes of his companion, shifted sulkily back to his place.
‘Have your own way,’ he said, ‘madman! It serves me right
for putting off to sea in such a devil’s craft as this!’
After all, what did it matter? As well be drowned in mid-
ocean as in sight of land.
The long day wore out, and no sail appeared. The wind
freshened towards evening, and the boat, plunging clum-
sily on the long brown waves, staggered as though drunk
with the water she had swallowed, for at one place near the
bows the water ran in and out as through a slit in a wine
skin. The coast had altogether disappeared, and the huge
ocean— vast, stormy, and threatening—heaved and hissed

For the Term of His Natural Life