Reardon rolled five sixes!

The _Narcissus_ had been out of Pernambuco harbor four days before Mr.
Reardon, upon comparing the sun--which all are agreed rises in the
east--with the direction in which the ship was headed, and then
extracting the cube root of the resultant product, and subtracting it
from the longtitude and latitude of the Cape of Good Hope, decided
that there must be something wrong with Mr. Schultz's navigation. So
he spoke to Mr. Schultz about it, and was laughingly informed that
they were traveling on a great circle. Thereupon Mr. Reardon
remembered that at sea a ship traveling on the arc of a great circle,
for some mysterious reason repudiates the old geometrical theorem that
a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. He
recalled that vessels plying between San Francisco and Yokohama
describe a great circle which brings them well up toward the Aleutian
Islands, So he was satisfied with the explanation, this being his
first voyage into the South Atlantic anyhow; but he continued to
observe the sun each morning, and still the vessel's head held far to
the south. A suspicion that all was not as it should be slowly settled
in Mr. Reardon's head, and though he said nothing, he used his ejes
and ears. A dozen times a day, as the ship rolled steadily south, he
was tempted to take down the speaking tube and confide his suspicions
to the master, confined in his state-room by reason of deep--but not
serious-knife wounds. Each time he was on the point of yielding,
however, he remembered that Mike Murphy had called him a renegade--so
he refrained.

The installation of the wireless plant and the presence aboard the
ship of Herr von Staden had failed to arouse his suspicions the first
day out. True, the wireless could not have been connected with the