easier to get along without food than it is without water. We can
eat our shoes if worse comes to worst, but we couldn't drink 'em."

As he spoke Wilson had been boring a hole in one of the water kegs,
and as Spider held a tin cup he tilted the keg to pour a draft
of the precious fluid. A thin stream of blackish, dry particles
filtered slowly through the tiny aperture into the bottom of the
cup. With a groan Wilson dropped the keg, and sat staring at the
dry stuff in the cup, speechless with horror.

"The kegs are filled with gunpowder," said Spider, in a low tone,
turning to those aft. And so it proved when the last had been
opened.

"Coal oil and gunpowder!" cried Monsieur Thuran. "SAPRISTI! What
a diet for shipwrecked mariners!"

With the full knowledge that there was neither food nor water on
board, the pangs of hunger and thirst became immediately aggravated,
and so on the first day of their tragic adventure real suffering
commenced in grim earnest, and the full horrors of shipwreck were
upon them.

As the days passed conditions became horrible. Aching eyes scanned
the horizon day and night until the weak and weary watchers would
sink exhausted to the bottom of the boat, and there wrest in
dream-disturbed slumber a moment's respite from the horrors of the
waking reality.

The sailors, goaded by the remorseless pangs of hunger, had eaten