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“Say,” yelled her captain from his door, “I’m blown out wi’ my barges, short o’ grub an’ water. Can you gi’ me some? That lime-juice sucker ahead won’t.”

“Can you tow us to New York?” asked Elisha, who had brought up the chronometer and placed it on the house, ready to take morning sights for his longitude if the sun should appear.

“No; not unless I sacrifice the barges an’ lose my contract wi’ the city. They’re garbage-scows, an’ I haven’t power enough to hook on to another. Just got coal enough to get in.”

“An’ what do you call this–a garbage-scow?” answered Elisha, ill-naturedly. “We’ve got no grub or water to spare. We’ve got troubles of our own.”

“Dammit, man, we’re thirsty here. Give us a breaker o’ water. Throw it overboard; I’ll get it.”

“No; told you we have none to spare; an’ we’re bein’ yanked out to sea.”

“Well, gi’ me a bottleful; that won’t hurt you.”

“No; sheer off. Git out o’ this. We’re not in the Samaritan business.”

A forceful malediction came from the tug captain, and a whirling monkey-wrench from the hand of the engineer, who had listened from the engine-room door. It struck Elisha’s chronometer and knocked it off the house, box and all, into the sea. He answered the profanity in kind, and sent an iron belaying-pin at the engineer; but it only dented the tug’s rail, and with these compliments the two craft separated, the tug steaming back to her scows.

“That lessens our chance just so much,” growled Elisha, as he joined the rest. “Now we can’t do all we agreed to.”

“Keep dead-reckonin’, ‘Lisha,” said Martin; “dat’s good ‘nough for us; an’, say, can’t you take sights by a watch–jess for a bluff, to show in de log-book?”

“Might; ‘t wouldn’t be reliable. Good enough, though, for log-book testimony. That’s what I’ll do.”

Inch by inch they gathered in their cable and coiled it down, unmoved by the protesting toots of the steamer’s whistle. When half of it lay on the deck, the steamer slowed down, while her crew worked at their end of the rope; then she went ahead, the schooner dropped back to nearly the original distance, and they saw a long stretch of new Manila hawser leading out from the bridle and knotted to their cable. They cursed and shook their fists, but pumped manfully on the windlass, and by nightfall had brought the knot over their bows by means of a “messenger,” and were heaving on the new hawser.

“Weakens our case just that much more,” growled Elisha. “We were to furnish the tow-line.”

“Heave away, my boys!” said Martin. “Dey’s only so many ropes aboard her, an’ when we get ’em all we’ve got dat boat an’ dem men.”

So they warped their craft across the Western Ocean. Knot after knot, hawser after hawser, came over the bows and cumbered the deck.

They would have passed them over the stern as fast as they came in, were they not salvors with litigation ahead; for their hands must be clean when they entered their claim, and to this end Elisha chalked out the longitude daily at noon and showed it to the steamer, always receiving a thankful acknowledgment on the whistle. He secured the figures by his dead-reckoning; but the carefully kept log-book also showed longitude by chronometer sights, taken when the sun shone, with his old quadrant and older watch, and corrected to bring a result plausibly near to that of the reckoning by log and compass. But the log-book contained no reference to the loss of the chronometer. That was to happen at the last.

On stormy days, when the sea rose, they dared not shorten their tow-line, and the steamer-folk made sure that it was long enough to eliminate the risk of its parting. So these days were passed in idleness and profanity; and when the sea went down they would go to work, hoping that the last tow-line was in their hands. But it was not until the steamer had given them three Manila and two steel hawsers, four weak–too weak–mooring-chains, and a couple of old and frayed warping-lines, that the coming up to the bow of an anchor-chain of six-inch link told them that the end was near, that the steamer had exhausted her supply of tow-lines, and that her presumably sane skipper would not give them his last means of anchoring–the other chain.