After the next daybreak time stood still—­or rather, I refused to note its passage.  For that morning I made out the skipper, drenched with spray, and his eyes bloodshot, no doubt through weariness and the weather, watching me from the saloon doorway.  I did not ask any questions, but pretended I was merely turning in my sleep.  It is probably better not to ask the man who has succeeded in losing you where you are, particularly when his eyes are bloodshot and he is wondering what the deuce he shall do about it.  And greater caution still is required when his reproachful silence gives you the idea that he thinks you a touch of ill-luck in his enterprise.  My companions, I believe, regretted I had not been omitted.  I tried, therefore, to be inconspicuous, and went up to seclude myself at the back of the boat on the poop, there to understudy a dog which is sorry it did it.  Not adverse fate itself could show a more misanthropic aspect than the empty overcast waste around us.  It was useless to appeal to it.  It did vouchsafe us one ship that morning, a German trawler with a fir tree lashed to her deck, ready for Christmas morning, I suppose, when perhaps they would tie herrings to its twigs.  But she was no good to us.  And the grey animosity granted us three others during the afternoon, and they were equally useless, for they had not sighted our fleet for a week.  All that interested me was the way the lookout on the bridge picked out a mark, which I could not see, for it was obscured where sea and sky were the same murk, and called it a ship.  Long before I could properly discern it, the look-out behaved as though he knew all about it.  But it was never the sign we wanted.  We had changed our course so often that I was beginning to believe that nobody aboard could make a nearer guess at our position than the giddy victim in blindman’s-buff.  A sextant was never used.  Apparently these fishermen found their way about on a little mental arithmetic compounded of speed, time, and the course.  That leaves a large margin for error.  So if they felt doubtful they got a plummet, greased it, and dipped it overboard.  When it was hauled up they inspected whatever might be sticking to the tallow, and at once announced our position.  At first I felt sceptical.  It was as though one who had got lost with you in London might pick up a stone in an unknown thoroughfare, and straightway announce the name of that street.  That would be rather clever.  But I discovered my fishermen could do something like it.

Our skipper no longer appeared at meals.  He was on the bridge day and night.  He acted quite well a pose of complete indifference, and said no more than:  “This has not happened to me for years.”  He repeated this slowly at reasonable intervals.  But he had lost the nimble impulse to chat about little things, and also his look of peering and innocent curiosity.  As now he did not come to our table, the others spoke of