Before Hovey and his men could reach the spot, Harrigan had climbed down the ladder with his precious bucket and was fleeing aft to the wireless house.
As he reached it, lights were showing from the main cabin, and there were choruses of yells announcing the discovery that Campbell was missed.

But Harrigan and the rest of the fugitives scarcely heard the sounds.

The Irishman was busy measuring as carefully as he could in the dark dippers of water which the others drank.
There was no sleep that night, partly from fear lest the infuriated mutineers should at last attempt to rush the wireless house, partly because they ate sparingly but long of the meat which Harrigan carved for them, and the bread, and partly also because of a singular odor which they had not noticed when they were tortured by thirst and hunger, and which now they observed for the first time.

It was peculiarly pungent and heavy with a sickening suggestion of sweetness about it.

None of them could describe it, saving Harrigan, who had been much in the country and likened the odor to the smell of an old straw stack which lay molding and rotting.
It seemed to increase--that smell--during the night, probably because their strength was returning and all their senses grew more acute.