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"Any nearer to land, Captain?" asked Ramsey

"I'ravely "The storm drove us north and west We're farther away froo"

"We won't last long in the Southern Hemisphere in the dead of summer without fresh water"

Scaggs gestured toward a pair of fins cutting the water fifty feet froht a boat within four days, Mr Ramsey, I fear the sharks will have themselves a sumptuous banquet"

The sharks did not have long to wait The second day after the storm, the bodies of those who succu seas were slipped over the side and quickly disappeared in a disturbance of bloody foanized it as a great white, feared as the sea's greediest th to be somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-four feet

The horror was only beginning Dorsett was the first to have a premonition of the atrocities that the poor wretches on the raft would inflict upon themselves

"They're up to so," he said to Betsy "I don't like the way they're staring at the women"

"Who are you talking about?" she asked through parched lips She had covered her face with a tattered scarf, but her bare ars below the skirt were already burned and blistered from the sun

"That scurvy lot of slers at the stern of the raft, led by the ins

He'd as soon slit your gullet as give you the ti a mutiny"

Betsy stared vacantly around the bodies sprawled on the raft "Why would they want to take command of this?"

"Ihis way over the convicts slouched about the da around the thirst He moved aardly, annoyed at how stiff his joints had beco onto ropes He was one of the feho dared approach the conspirators, and he ins'

henchnored him as they muttered to themselves in low tones and cast fierce looks at Sheppard and his infantrymen

"What brings you nosin' around, Dorsett?" grunted Huggins

The s e flattened nose and an enor and blackened teeth, which coive him a hideous leer