None of them knew the color of the

None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened
upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops,
which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon
narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that
seemed thrust up in points like rocks. Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat
which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and
tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small boat navigation.
The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale
which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two
flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: "Gawd! That
was a narrow clip." As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward over the broken sea.
The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself
suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin little oar and it
seemed often ready to snap.
The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was
there.
The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection
and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when,
willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel
is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he command for a day or a decade, and this captain
had on him the stern impression of a scene in the grays of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a
stump of a top-mast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low and
lower, and down. Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was
deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears.
"Keep'er a little more south, Billie," said he.
"A little more south,' sir," said the oiler in the stern.
A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and, by the same token,
a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As
each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously
high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at
the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the
summit of each wave, requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully
bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline and arrive bobbing
and nodding in front of the next menace.
A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one
wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious
to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an
idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average
experience, which is never at sea in a dinghy. As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all
else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular
wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water. There was a terrible
grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests.