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In the Milky Way, near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it beautiful and populous with stars.

Lestrange’s eyes travelled from this mystery to the burning cross, and the nameless and numberless stars reaching to the sea-line, where they paled and vanished in the light of the rising moon. Then he became aware of a figure promenading the quarter-deck. It was the “Old Man.”

A sea captain is always the “old man,” be his age what it may. Captain Le Farges’ age might have been forty-five. He was a sailor of the Jean Bart type, of French descent, but a naturalised American.

“I don’t know where the wind’s gone,” said the captain as he drew near the man in the deck chair. “I guess it’s blown a hole in the firmament, and escaped somewheres to the back of beyond.”