Chapter 7

THE RETRIEVE.

NIGHT THE FOURTEENTH.

SAN RAMON.

I have never set eyes on the village of San Ramon, but I have heard it described by two men--by one of them in great detail--and their descriptions tally.

It is a village or townlet of two hundred houses or so. It lies about a third of the way down the coast of Peru, close over the sea. It has no harbour: a population of half-breeds--mestizos? Is that the word?--sprinkled with whitish cosmopolitans, and here and there a real white man. But these last, though they wear shoes and keep up among themselves a pretence to be the aristocracy of the place, have really resigned life for this anticipatory Paradise where they grow grey on remittance money, eating the lotus, drinking smoked Scotch in the hotel veranda, swapping stories, and--since they know one another all too well in this drowsy decline of their day--feebly and falsely pretending to one another what gallant knowing fellows they had been in its morning. As for their shoes, token of their caste, they usually wear them unlaced by day and not infrequently sleep in them at night. With the exception of Engelbaum, who keeps the hotel, the white citizens are unmarried. With the exception of Frau Engelbaum-- aged sixty and stout at that--there are no white ladies in San Ramon.

And yet San Ramon is a Paradise. A tall mountain backs it. The Pacific kisses its feet. A spring bursting from the mountain, about four thousand feet up, has cut a gorge down which it tumbles in cascades to the beach and the salt water. Where the source leaps from the rock the vegetation begins, as you would expect. It widens and grows more luxuriant all the way down. The stream comes to a forty-foot waterfall between sheer rock curtained with creepers; whence it hurries down through plantations of banana, past San Ramon, which perches where it can, house by house, on shelves hidden in greenery. There it takes another great leap into a basin it has hollowed for itself in the steep-to beach.

We have come down by nature's route. Now we'll climb back by man's. A sort of stairway, broad-stepped, made of pebbles and pounded earth, mounts in fairly well engineered zigzags to the plateau above the lower fall, and in a straighter flight beside the gorge to the hotel which is the topmost building of San Ramon. Above that it becomes a gully curved by torrential rains; above that, zigzags again as a mule-track up to a pass in the mountains--and thereafter God knows whither. Connecting the lower zigzags (I need scarcely say) are short-cuts or slides made by the brown-footed children, who plunge down almost as steeply and quickly as the stream itself when the fortnightly fruit-steamer blows her siren beyond the point.

There is no harbour, you understand. The small steamer--by name the _P.M. Diaz_--drops anchor a short mile out in a half-protected roadstead, and discharges what she has to discharge, or lades what she has to lade, by boats. Her ladings during the banana-harvest are feverish, tumultuous, vociferous. Her ladings during the sleepy remainder of the year comprise canned meats, Scotch whisky, illustrated magazines, and plantation inspectors.

It was almost twelve months to a day--I am trying to tell the story to-night as a novelist would tell it, but without going beyond the material supplied to me--It was almost twelve months from the day Foe left the portico of the Flaxman Building Hotel, New York, that he stepped ashore on the beach below San Ramon and resigned his light suitcase to a herd of bare-legged boys who offered to carry it up to the hotel, but seemed likelier to dismember it on the way and share up the shreds. They took him, as a matter of course, for a plantation inspector, arrived in the off-season. He was the only passenger landed from the _P.M. Diaz_, which had dropped anchor comfortably, in perfect weather, but would sail in the morning. A light land-breeze blew off the mountains: but it passed over a mile of water before rippling the sea, which, inshore, lay as glass. The sunset from the Pacific lit up San Ramon above him, all terraced and embowered.

Halted there, gazing up and taking stock of this Paradise before scaling it, Foe could not be aware, though he might have guessed, that half a hundred embrasures in the climbing foliage hid field-glasses and telescopes of which he was the one and common focus. Up at the hotel, one idler said to another, "Will it be Morgansen this time, d'you think?" The other passed on the question to Engelbaum, who was so far the master of his guests that he had lazily commandeered the large telescope on the _galeria_, and without gainsay. "If it's old Morgansen," the second man added, "we might trot some way down the hill to wish him well. The day's cooling in."

"It's not Morgansen," announced Engelbaum. "A new man--thinnish--Oh, yes, but an inspector. You can tell these scientific men by their cut."

"Hope they haven't sacked old Morgansen," said the first idler. "He's been a bit of a scandal, these three years. But he knows about bananas more'n a banana would own to, even with a blush."

Half-way over the hill, on a packing-case in a bare veranda, sat a man who for three months had avoided the hotel and these loungers, and been given up by all of them (by some enviously) as a lost friend. A woman reclined--good old novelists' word--in a sort of deck-chair three paces away. The windows of the house stood wide, and showed rooms within carpetless, matless, swept if not garnished, with other packing-cases stacked about and labelled. There was even a label on the chair in which the woman reclined: but her skirt hid it.

When the whistle of the fruit-steamer had first sounded, out beyond the Point, and almost before the alert young population of San Ramon could tear down the pathway beside the bungalow's discreet garden, she had risen with a catch of the breath, taken up a pair of field-glasses and scanned the offing.

"It is she beyond a doubt," she had announced.

"What other could it be?" the man had answered, pretty lazily. "And that being so--"

Said the woman--I am trying to tell this in correct fashion--"Why are you so dull?--who, when the boat used to call, would snatch up the glasses and be no company for anyone until you had counted everything she discharged."

Farrell--oh! by the way it's about time I told you that the man was Farrell--Farrell looked at the woman. Farrell said:

No, the devil! I can't tell it the professional way, after all. There's the woman. Well, the woman was young, and fair to see, dark, well-bred, with a tinge of lemon, and descended pretty straight from the Incas--"instead of which" she preferred to call herself Mrs. M'Kay or M'Kie, having been caught and married in an unguarded moment by someone who had arrived in San Ramon to push a new brand of whisky and stayed to push it the wrong way. Since M'Kie's death--or M'Kay's--whichever it was--new-comers had to choose between Engelbaum's, on the summit, and the lady, an heiress in a small way, who played the guitar, half-way down the hill, but frowned on the drinking-habit.

Farrell, you will perceive, had chosen the better way, and had become a voluntary exile from Engelbaum's in consequence. That, or the exercise of running, had done him a power of good. Just now he was bronzed, spare, even inclining to gauntness. Twelve months before, he had shortened his whiskers, as a first step to disguise. Since then, and to please this woman, he had grown a beard which he kept short and trimmed to a point, naval fashion. It was straw-coloured, went well with his bronzed complexion and improved his appearance very considerably. It may be that this growth had encouraged the hair on his scalp or stimulated it by rivalry to renewed effort: more likely the play of sunshine and sea-breeze had done the trick between them; but anyhow Farrell now possessed a light mat of silky yellowish hair on the top of his head--as the nigger song has it, in the place where the wool ought to grow. Shoes, blue dungaree trousers and a striped shirt were his clothing--the shirt opened at the throat and to the second button, disclosing a V of naked chest as healthily tanned as his face. His face had thinned too. His eyes no longer bulged. They had receded well under the pent of his brow and, in receding, taken colour from its shadow.

"I am not dull, Santa," said Farrell. "I am only content and--well, a little bit regretful, and--well yes, again, the least bit lazy. But what does it matter? Ylario has gone down to the beach. He will send off word to the skipper that all this truck will be ready on the foreshore by five-thirty to-morrow. In good weather he never weighs before seven, and the weather is settled."

The woman, at one word of his, had turned and set down her glasses.

"Regretful?" She echoed it as a question, and followed it up with a question. "At what are you staring so hard?"

He lifted his eyes and met hers very steadily, earnestly. "At your shape, Santa," was his answer. "When your back is turned, I am always looking at you so."

"Regretfully?" she asked, mocking.

"As for the regret, you know what it is and must be. How can a man feel it different, when we leave this place to-morrow? Don't women feel that way towards places where they have been happy?"

She picked up the glasses again and set them with her gaze seaward before answering. Thus the shadow of her hands screened any emotion--if emotion there were--on her face.

"I have not been happy here, all the time," she answered softly, readjusting the glass, or pretending to. "Not by any means. San Ramon to me is a hole. . . . Yes," she went on deliberately, "I know well what you are going to say. I have _you_: but I want something more--something I have always wanted and, it seems to me, every woman always wants--something beyond the sky-line. In Sydney, now--"

"You'll find there's a sky-line waiting for you at Sydney," said Farrell; "as like to this one as two peas--and just as impossible to get beyond"--which mayn't seem very good grammar, but is how he said it. "Now to me a sky-line's a sky-line--just something to have you standing against."

"You shall have a kiss for that, _caballero_--in a moment," she purred, and slanted the binoculars down to bear on the beach. "Only one passenger," she announced.

"Usual inspector, no doubt," said Farrell, rolling a cigarette.

"Ye-es--by the look of him. . . . Oh, there's Ylario, all right, talking to the boatman! . . . He must be a stranger, I think--by the way he's staring up at the town."

"Ylario was bred and born here; of uncertain parents, to be sure--"

She laughed. "Foolish! . . . I meant the inspector, of course."

"What's he like?" asked Farrell. "Report."

She lowered the glass, twisted the screw of it idly, and returned to her hammock-chair, beside which she set it down on the veranda floor.

"Now I'll make a confession to you," she said, picking up her guitar and throwing her body back in the chair. "I love you," she said. "When you are close, and alone with me, my heart feels as if it could melt into yours. . . . No, don't get up: you shall have your kiss, in good time. But when you--what shall I say?--when you _all-white_ men are at all far off, or when many of you are together, I cannot well distinguish. . . . Ah, pardon me, beloved! Haven't you had that trouble with people of other races than your own--among a crowd of Japanese, say? And the shepherds on the mountains behind here--have you not wondered how they can know every sheep in a flock of many hundred?"

Farrell was on his feet by this time, and in something of a passion. "Am I, then," he stammered out; "--am I, then, so like any of the others, up at Engelbaum's?"

"Calm yourself, O beloved," said Santa, brushing her finger-nails, gipsy-wise and soft as butterflies, over, the strings of her guitar. "Calm yourself, and hearken. You are all the world to me, and you know it. Yet there is something--something I could explain to you better, maybe, if I knew English better . . . and yet I am not sure. . . . Let me try, however. . . . It always seems to me with you English, you Americans, you white-skinned men--with all the ones I have known--that the fault is not all mine when I find you alike just at first; that every one of you ought to be a man quite different from all other men; that you, of your race--yes, every one--were meant for something you have missed--were meant to be--Oh, what is the word?"

"'Distinguished?'" suggested Farrell, standing up. "I never was that, Santa--though, back in England, at one time, I had a notion to make some sort of a mark."

Santa let the neck of the guitar fall back against her breast and clasped her hands suddenly. "Yes, that is it;--to make your mark! Every woman who loves a man wants him to make his mark somehow, somewhere. . . . I cannot tell you why: but it is so."

Farrell took a turn on the veranda. "My dear," he said tenderly, coming back and halting before her, "do you realise that I am fifty years old?"

She pressed her palms over her eyes. "You keep telling me that, and it hurts! Besides, you grow younger every day . . . and--and I cannot bear to hear you say it!" She lowered her hands and smiled up, but through tears.

"The men who find their way to San Ramon from my country or from the States," he went on, picking up the binoculars absently while his eyes sought the sky-line, "do not come in any hope of making their mark--not even plantation-inspectors." Farrell fumbled with the screw, adjusting the focus. "If that is why we are going to Sydney--"

"Whatever happens," declared Santa, "I will love you better anywhere than in San Ramon: and I have loved you well enough here! The men who come to San Ramon--pah! this for them!" She thrummed an air-- _La Camisa de la Lola_--on the guitar and broke off with another small sound of scorn from her throat. "_That's_ what suits them, and what all of them are worth!"

She brushed the strings again: and if Farrell made any sound at all, the buzz of them covered it. He had brought the glasses to bear on the beach.

Santa started to thrum on the lower strings. Farrell swung about suddenly, set the glasses down, and walked back into the dismantled house.

Now so far I have evidence for all I'm telling you. From this point for thirty seconds or so, I am going to guess what happened. Santa went on thrumming. She heard his footsteps on the bare floor as he went through the echoing, dismantled room behind her. She heard them on the brick of the broad passage which separated the living-rooms of the bungalow from its bed-chambers. She heard him lift the latch of the outer door. She heard the outer door shut behind him. Then she waited for his footsteps to sound again on the sunken pathway which ran downhill beside her patch of garden, hidden by the cactus fence--or rather, deep below it. "He is standing on the doorstep," she said to herself, "lighting a cigarette"; and then, "but he is a long while about it. This is strange." Still as her ear caught no sound of him, Santa sprang up and slipped, guitar in hand, to the outer door--the fence being too tall for her to over-pry, and moreover prickly. She opened the door and peeped out. There was no one down the pathway. There was no one up the pathway, which here, for some fifty or sixty yards, climbed straight, full in view. "And what on earth has become of him?" wondered Santa. "He did not go down--I should have heard him. But why should he go up? He has broken with those drinkers at Engelbaum's. . . . Besides, it is unbelievable that, in this short time, he should have vanished. . . ."

So much for guesswork. Now I come back to the story as it was afterwards related to me.

Santa, standing there in the porch, guitar in hand and leaning forward over the rail which guarded a long flight of stone steps, heard a footfall on the road below--an ascending footfall. For a moment she mistook it for Farrell's: she believed she could distinguish Farrell's from any other man's: and so for a moment she stood mystified.

Then a man hove in view around the corner . . . not Farrell, but the newly-landed stranger she had spied through her binoculars--the presumed Inspector. His eyes were lifted as he calculated the new gradient ahead of him, and thus on the instant he caught sight of Santa aloft in the porch-way. Something held Santa's feet.

"Many pardons, _senora_," said the Stranger, halting a little before he came abreast of the stairway and lifting his hat. "But can you tell me if this path leads to the Hotel?"

Now Santa was confused and a little abashed--it may have been because in her haste she had forgotten to drape her head in her mantilla--a rite proper to be observed by Peruvian ladies before showing themselves out-of-doors. But she could not help smiling: the question being so absurd.

"Seeing, _sentor_, that there can be no other," she answered, with a small wave of the hand out and towards the gorge down which the river cascaded always so loudly that they both had unconsciously raised the pitch of their voices.

From the pathway above came the sound of stray stones dislodged under a heavy plunging tread; and there was Farrell striding down, with his hands in his trousers' pockets.

In the right pocket he carried a revolver, which he had picked up on his way through the house. His forefinger felt about its trigger.

He had recognised Foe through the glass. He had pelted up the path in the old sweating terror, making for the mountain as if driven, to call on it to cover him.

Close by Engelbaum's gate he overtook three small boys contending around a suit-case: the point being that all three could not demand reward for carrying so light a burden. If the owner were a fool, or generously inclined (which amounted to the same thing), two of the three might put in a colourable claim for services rendered.

In white countries one boy fights with another. In San Ramon as many as fifteen can fight indiscriminately, and the vanquished are weeded out by gradual process. Farrell shook the urchins apart, driving them for a moment from the suit-case as one would drive three wasps off a honey-pot. . . . It lay at his feet. Yes, he'd have recognised it anywhere, even without help of the half-effaced "J. F." painted on its canvas cover. It was a far-travelled piece of luggage, and much-enduring--What are those adjectives by which Homer is always calling Ulysses? . . . It bore many labels. One, with "Southampton" upon it, was apparently pretty recent . . . and another with "Waterloo."

He turned the case over while the boys eyed him, keeping their distance. His brain worked more and more clearly. . . Foe had returned to England, then, to pick up the trail. But how had he struck it? . . . There was only one way. . . . He had, of course, been obliged to send letters home from time to time--letters to his firm, to his bankers for money--instructions to pay his housekeeper-- possibly a score of letters in all. Foe must have obtained possession of one and spotted the postmark on the Peruvian stamp. . . .

Of a sudden he realised his cowardice; and flushed, with shame and manhood together, there in the pathway. . . . This thing was no longer a duel. Three were in it now, and the third was Santa. . . . The old scare had caught him, surprised him, and he had run from recollected habit. . . . It had been base. . . . Why, of course, Santa made all the difference! He must go back to protect Santa.

At the thought of her he felt a second flush of shame sweep up in him, quite different from the first and quite horrible. The tide of it scorched his face as if flaying it. And so--if you'll understand--in the very moment of knowing himself twice vulnerable-- no, ten times as vulnerable--this Farrell, loving this woman, became a man: and three small ragamuffins stood about him and witnessed the outward process.

The outward process ended in his fishing out three _dineros_ from his trouser pocket and bestowing one on each of them--twopence-halfpenny or thereabouts is a godsend to a juvenile in San Ramon. "There, little fools!" he said. "Take the stranger's bag along and don't quarrel any more. There is nothing in this world so silly as quarrelling."

With that he went back down the hill, and so came on Foe and on Santa, talking down to Foe from the balcony porch.

"Hallo, old man!" said Farrell, looking Foe straight in the eyes: and "Hallo!" answered Foe, looking Farrell straight in the eyes. Santa, gazing down from the rail, thought it strange that they did not shake hands, as Britons and Americans do when they met.

"I found three rascals," said Farrell easily, "scrapping for the honour of delivering a suit-case at Engelbaum's hotel--a suit-case that I recognised. I rescued it, and it is now safe in the porch. . . . Oh, by the way, though you seem to have made acquaintance, let me do the formal and introduce you to my wife. Santa, this is Doctor Foe, an old fellow-traveller."

Foe gave him one glance, shrewd and steady, before looking aloft and again raising his hat. The thrust did not penetrate Farrell's defence.

"It's awkward," said Farrell, "that we can't even offer you a bed. We're all packed up, ready to sail by the steamer to-morrow. Mrs. Farrell and I in fact are shifting quarters. . . . Staying?"

"No," said Foe imperturbably. "I shall be sailing to-morrow, too. . . . I just heard of this place, and thought I'd like to have a look at it before going on. . . . Shouldn't think of troubling you."

"Curious, how small the world is," went on Farrell in a level voice. "You won't mind my talking a bit in the old manner? . . . It sort of puts us back at the old ease, eh? . . . Well then, we can't offer to put you up. But if you don't mind a packing-case for a chair and another for a table--eh, Santa?"

"We shall be charmed," said Santa.

"You understand that it will be a picnic," added Farrell.

"My good sir!" protested Foe.

"Yes? . . . It will be better than Engelbaum's, any way. I don't mind promising," said Farrell. "We will talk over old times, and Santa shall play her guitar to us."

That is how the two men met.

The _P.M. Diaz_ plied no farther than Callao. From Callao the Farrells, with their furniture, and Foe in company, worked down by coasters to Valparaiso.

Does any one of you remember the mystery of the _Eurotas_? which regularly for about four months occupied from an inch-and-a-half to four inches space in the newspapers. In 1909 . . . pretty late in the year. She happened to be the first ship of a new line started between Valparaiso and Sydney, and her owners had so well boomed the adventure in the Press that, when she began to be reported as overdue, the public woke up and she became as interesting as a lost dog. She was of 12,000 tons, new, Clyde-built, well-found, and carried a mixed cargo, with about twenty passengers. Two vessels reported having passed her, about three hundred miles out. After that she had become as a ship that had never been.

In his casual way--for I must remind you that he and I had lost all trace of Foe and Farrell in New York--Jimmy lit on the next item of news.

Long before the _Eurotas_ was posted as "missing," the newspapers published a list of her passengers. Jimmy, seizing on this, ran his eye down it, and let out the sort of cry with which he greets all news, good, bad, or indifferent.

"I say, Otty!--here it is, and what do you make of it?--'The s.s. _Eurotas_. . . . List of Passengers.

"Mr. and Mrs. P. Farrell, San Ramon, Peru. Professor J. Foe, of London. . . .'"

And after that there was silence for four years. The bell at Lloyd's never rang to announce the arrival of the _Eurotas_. By Christmas her underwriters were paying up, and the newspapers had lost interest in her fate.

NIGHT THE FIFTEENTH.

REDIVIVUS.

About seven weeks later Norgate called on me with evidence that settled the last doubt: a letter from Foe, written from Valparaiso. It was brief enough. It merely announced that he was on the eve of sailing for Sydney and wished to have credit for 600 pounds opened with the Bank of New South Wales. "I have booked a berth on the _Eurotas_," it concluded, "and go aboard to-night. She's a new ship, owned by a new line, of which you may or may not have heard--the 'Southern Cross Line.' We hear enough about it in this town, the Company having contrived to fall foul of the dock labour here. I don't know the rights or wrongs of it, but some sort of boycott is threatened. However, this sort of dispute usually gets itself settled at the last moment; and anyhow I shall get to Sydney by some means or other. So you may safely mail there. No need to cable. I have plenty of money for immediate purposes."

"What had I best do?" asked Norgate. "Lloyd's are about giving the _Eurotas_ up."

"Cable out and make sure," said I. "If he calls at the Bank, he calls; and if he doesn't, there are no bones broken. _Something_ has gone wrong with the ship; and in the mix-up he may easily have lost his ready cash and be landed at Sydney without a cent."

I should have told you that, about a fortnight before this, Jimmy had solved, or partially solved, the puzzle of that entry "Mr. and Mrs. P. Farrell" on the passenger-list. Jimmy had found a good girl, and as pretty almost as she was good, and yet imprudent enough to consent to marry him. This had the effect of rendering him at once and surprisingly prudent. As the poet puts it, "he had found out a flat for his fair," and as he himself put it, "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow: but be-shrew me, we never thought of making my bank-manager one of the party, to break him in to our ways; the consequence being that Elinor's maid will have to stick a bedroom-suite priced five-pounds-ten, while the other domestics, unless dividends improve, sleep (poor souls, insecurely) upon bedsteads liable to be spirited from under them at any moment by a Hire System that knows no bowels. . . . By George!" sighed Jimmy. "If we hadn't let Farrell slip through our fingers! Do you know, Otty, I've an idea," he announced. "Why shouldn't I take the Tottenham Court Road to-morrow, visit Farrell's old place of business, and kill two birds with one stone?"

"It sounds a sporting proposition," I agreed, "though sketchily presented."

"Adumbrated," suggested Jimmy. "That's a good word. I found it in yesterday's _Observer_."

"Adumbrated, then," said I. "The Tottenham Court Road--"

"--_And_ two birds with one stone. No moors for me this year: I'm back on the simple life and the catapult. . . . You just wait."

There really is no resisting Jimmy, nor ever will be. He went up the Tottenham Court Road next day, walked into Farrell's late place of business and demanded to see the General Manager; and--if you'll believe it--that dignitary was fetched amid a hush of awe. "I dropped in," explained Jimmy, "to see one of those cheap bedroom suites you advertise, in pickled walnut--or is it _marron glace?_-- suitable for a house-parlourmaid. The fact is, I'm going to get married--well, you've guessed that--otherwise, of course, I shouldn't be here. . . . My intended wife--she's a Devonshire lady, by the way--from near Honiton. Anything wrong about Honiton? . . . No? I beg your pardon--I thought you smiled. . . . Well, as I was about to explain, my intended wife, coming as she does from near Honiton-- that's where they make the lace--likes her servants to be comfortable: at least, so she says. Your late Managing Director, had he lived--" Here Jimmy made a pause.

"You knew our Mr. Farrell, sir?" asked the present Managing Director, sympathetically.

"He honoured me with his acquaintance. If he had lived," said Jimmy . . . "But there! . . . By the way . . . that second marriage of his--wasn't it rather sudden? I understood him to be a confirmed widower."

"We know nothing about it, sir: nothing beyond what he conveyed in a letter to our Vice-Chairman. In fact, sir, during the last year or so of his life, when Mr. Farrell took his strange fancy for foreign parts, it seemed to us--well, it seemed to us that, in his strange condition of mind, anything might happen. To this day, sir, we haven't what you might call any certitude of his demise. It is not, up to this moment, legally proven--as they say. Our last letter from him was dated from far up the coast--from a place called San Ramon, which I understand to be in Peru. In it he announced that he was married again, and to a lady (as we gathered) of Peruvian descent. He added that he had never, previously to the time of writing or thereabouts, known complete happiness."

Jimmy brought back this information, having, on top of it, acquired a bedroom suite of painted deal. "And there," said he, "the matter must rest. Foe's gone, and Farrell's gone. Both decent, in their way; and both, but for foolish temper, alive now and hearty."

So it seemed to be, and the book to be closed. I mourned for Jack, yet not as I should have mourned for him a year or two before. Jimmy married and left me, and soon after I moved from our old quarters in the Temple to my present rooms in Jermyn Street.

Four years passed: and then, one fine morning, my door opened, and John Foe called me by name.

"Hallo, Roddy! How goes it?"

I jumped up, in a pretty bad scare. It was the voice that did it: for, my door making an angle with the window, and the day being sunny, he stood there against a strong light--sort of silhouette effect, as you might put it. And there was a something about him, thus gloomed--but we'll talk of that by and by. The voice was Jack Foe's, and none other.

"It's all right," he went on easily. "Pull yourself together. . . . It _is_ the Ancient Mariner come home, but you needn't imitate the Pilot and fall down in a fit. . . . Where's the Pilot's Boy, by the way--young Jimmy Collingwood? You still keep Jephson, I see. . . . I happened on Jephson at your street-door, just returned from posting a letter. Jephson performed the holy Hermit very creditably: he raised his eyes and almost sat down on the doorstep and prayed where he did sit. 'Doctor Foe!' said Jephson. 'Good Lord, send may I never--!'--which amounts to a prayer, eh? . . . He let me in with his latchkey, and I told him I'd run up unannounced. . . . Well?"

He came forward. In the old days Jack and I never shook hands; nor did we now. He set down hat, gloves, and umbrella carelessly on my knee-hole table and dropped into a chair with a long-drawn sigh. "Reminds one--eh?--of the famous stage-direction in _The Rovers-- Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the Thirty Years' War_. . . . Well? What are you still staring at? . . . Oh, I perceive! It's my clothes. . . . Yes; I should inform you that they are expensive, and the nearest compromise a Valparaiso tailor and I could reach in realising our several ideas of a Harley Street doctor. I am going to open a practice in that neighbourhood, and thought I would lose no time. The hat and umbrella over there are all right, if you'll give yourself the trouble to examine them. I bought them on the way along."

He was right, in a way, about his clothes. (I believe I have already mentioned that Jack had always dressed himself carefully and in good form.) His frock-coat had a fullness of skirt, and his trousers a bluish aggressive tint, that I couldn't pass for metropolitan. His boots were worse--of some wrong sort of patent leather. But they ought not to have altered the man as I felt that he was altered. . . . Yes, cheapened and coarsened, in some indefinable way. His hair had thinned and showed a bald patch: not a large patch: still, there it was. His shape had been rather noticeably slim. I won't say that it had grown pursy, but it had run to seed somehow. Least of all I liked the change in his eyes, which bulged somewhat, showing an unhealthy white glitter. I set down this glitter as due to long weeks at sea: but the explanation couldn't quite satisfy me. When a lost friend returns as it were from the grave--from shipwreck, at any rate, and uncharted travel--you look to find him gaunt, brown, leathery, hollow of cheek and eye, eh? Foe's appearance didn't answer to this conception . . . not one little bit.

"Then you didn't sail in the _Eurotas_, after all?" said I, finding speech. "We saw your name on the list."

"Oh, yes, I did," he interrupted. "And, by the way, we shall have to talk about her--or, rather, about what I ought to do. . . . Yes, I know what you'll be advising. 'Go straight to Lloyd's,' no doubt."

"Man alive," said I, "why not? If you were aboard of her--and if, as you tell me, you fetched somehow to Sydney--why in God's name hasn't Lloyd's heard of it months ago? There are such things as cables. . . . Unless, to be sure, you have a reason?"

"I have and I haven't," said Jack. "My turning-up doesn't hurt anyone, does it? The _Eurotas_ went down, sure enough: and _I_ didn't scuttle her, if that's what you suspect."

"Please don't be an ass, Jack," I pleaded.

"Well, I don't see," he continued, ruminating, "--I don't see any way but to go to Lloyd's and tell them about it. Yet equally I don't see what good it can do. The underwriters have paid up, eh?"

"More than three years ago," I told him.

"Well, then . . . I was perfectly well prepared to answer any questions at Valparaiso. I landed in my own name. I went back to the same hotel. And 'Foe' is not the most common of names, especially when you write 'Doctor' before it. . . . No, I'm wrong. Farrell had entered our names on the register, and had entered mine as 'Professor.' On my return I wrote it 'John Foe, M.D.' But anyway, not a soul in the hotel recognised me. . . . I think my looks must have altered, somehow. . . . So I let it go. I dare say you won't understand, not knowing the kind of experiences I've been through, nor the number of 'em. But you may understand that after a goodish while as a castaway I was tired beyond the point of answering more questions than I should happen to be asked. . . . So I gave Valparaiso a silent blessing, and came home by the first ship, to consult you and Collingwood. What--let me repeat--have you done with Collingwood?"

"Jimmy?" said I. "He's married, a year since, and is already the father of a bouncing boy. I acted as his best man, by request. He has a delightful and tiny wife who keeps him in order, which he passes on to the County of Warwickshire as Justice of the Peace and Coram. . . . But about the _Eurotas_?" I persisted. "I don't think you quite realise. There were passengers on board: and for months--"

"Of course there were passengers," Foe agreed. "It won't help their relatives (will it?) to know for certain what they pretty well know already. As I hinted to Norgate in my last letter, there was a labour crisis on when we sailed. Some aggrieved blackguard on the dock, acting on his own or under command of his 'Union,' shovelled half a dozen bombs in with the coal. Simple process. Between seven hundred and a thousand miles out, this particular batch of coal was reached and shovelled into the forward furnaces. I counted four explosions. Two of them blew her bows to pieces, and she sank by the head and was gone in twenty minutes.

"Must I tell it, when I am home and dying to ask questions?--Oh, very well, then. . . . I shall be perfectly truthful so far as the history goes; but I warn you that at a certain point you won't like it, and you'll go on to like it less. You and I have been friends, Roddy, and you naturally suppose that I've come straight to you, as my first friend, to be welcomed and to ask for counsel. But you suppose wrong. I am come asking neither for advice, nor for a sympathy-- which I know I shan't get."

"My dear Jack--" I began to protest.

"Oh, be quiet," said he, "and let _me_ do the talking! I've had no one to talk to, these five months around the Horn, but a Norwegian skipper, a first mate of the same country, a fellow-passenger shipped off as a dipsomaniac for a cure (we lost him somewhere in the worst of it--I've an idea he let himself be swept overboard), and a mixed crew that I helped to cure of _beri-beri_ at St. Helena. So I want to do the talking, with your leave.

"--And I want to say this first, foremost, once and for all. I am come _simply to tell you_. I understand the devil of a lot about hatred by this time--more than you will ever begin to guess. But you taught me, anyhow, this much about friendship, that I couldn't bear to go along with you without your knowing every atom of the truth. That means, we're going to be clean cuts, when I've done. . . . You'll loathe the tale. But, damn it, you shall respect me for this, that I cut clean, for old sake's sake, and wiped up the account, before we parted as strangers and I started life afresh."

"All this is pretty mysterious, Jack," said I. "You know that, for all the hurt he'd done you, I shied out of helping your pursuit of Farrell. . . . Tell me, what happened to Farrell? Went down in the _Eurotas_, I guess, and so squared accounts. That's what you mean-- eh?--by your clean cut and starting life afresh? . . . If so, for your sake I'm glad of it."

"He didn't go down in the _Eurotas_," Foe answered gravely: "As a matter of fact I dragged him on board one of the boats with my own hands."

"What?" said I. "Farrell another survivor?"

"Upon my word," he answered, lighting a cigarette, "I can't swear to Farrell's being alive or dead. Probably he's dead; but anyway I've no further use for him, and that's where the clean cut comes in. I had to quit hold of him because a woman beat me. . . . Now sit quiet and listen."

FOE'S NARRATIVE.

"Did you know that Farrell had married? . . . Yes, at San Ramon, a little portless place some way down the coast of Peru. The woman was a Peruvian and owned a banana-strip there, left to her by her first husband, a drunkard, in part-compensation for having ill-used and beaten her.

"When I ran Farrell to earth there, after he'd given me the slip for twelve months and more, this woman had married him and almost made a new man of him. In another month or so I don't doubt she'd have converted him into man enough to tell her all the truth, and let her deliver him.

"As it was, he passed me off for his friend--the ass! . . . I shipped with them, and we worked down the coast, by fruit-ship and sloop, to Valparaiso, intending for Sydney. . . . Now at this point I might easily make myself out a calculating villain. Farrell was enamoured to feebleness, and to make love to his Santa was an opportunity cast into my lap by the gods. . . . But actually, before I could even meditate this simple villainy, I had fallen in love with her because I couldn't help it.

"Now I had never been in love before, and I took the disease pretty severely. And I should say that I took it rather curiously: but you shall judge, for I'll set out the credit side of the account just as plainly as the other.

"I hated the man, as you know: I loved the woman, as I've told you. But--here's the puzzle--strange to say, at that time, and for a long while, these two passions did not conflict or even contend at all, as neither did they help. I couldn't hate Farrell any worse than I did already. If I'd hated him just a little less, I might have killed him, to get him out of the way. But I give you my word, I never thought of shortening the chase in that way. Farrell, you may say, had become necessary to me: by this time I couldn't think of living without him. . . . Now I know what's crossing your mind. I might have piled up the torture on Farrell, and at the same time have played on that other passion, by setting myself to debauch Santa. No, I'm not complaining. You shall have as bad to condemn before I've done, so you needn't apologise. But, as it happens, I wasn't that sort of blackguard. Moreover, it wouldn't have worked, anyhow. Santa was as good as her name--

"No, damn it! I will clear myself of _that_! . . . You'll understand that I loved the woman, and--well, in the old days, as you'll do me the justice to remember, I hated men who played loose among women. As for 'making love' to Santa--oh, I can't explain to you, who never saw her, how utterly that was beyond question on either side. . . . Almost white she was, with the blood of the Incas in her--blood of Castile, too, belike--and yet all of a woman, with funny rustic ways that turned at any moment to royal. . . . And she loved Farrell--my God!

"I wonder now if she guessed--guessed at the time, I mean. They say that women always guess; which in these matters is as good as knowing. . . . But I'm holding up my story."

"The _Eurotas_ went down in something like 36, south latitude, longitude 105 and a half west. That's as near as I make it: that is to say, some three or four hundred miles from any known land save Easter Island, which lay well away north and to windward, for we were down where the main winds set between W. and N. That's as close as I can give it to you. In seafaring matters I leave seamen to their own job, and don't worry about reckonings and day's runs. It's their business to take me, mine to trust their skill. You will own, Roddy, that if fools had only kept their noses out of _my_ job in life, I shouldn't be having to tell you this story.

"Anyhow, Macnaughten--that was the skipper's name--took all the ship's instruments with him on board his own boat, which was the last to quit.

"He was a good man, and I couldn't but admire his behaviour, first and last. The _Eurotas_ went down within half an hour of the first explosion; which had surprised us passengers on deck as we were chatting and watching the sunset. The sea was calm as a pond, with a bank of cloud to northward, all edged with gold on its western fringes.

"I think this calm, resting over sea and sky, may have helped us through the catastrophe. The only irritation I felt was at the slowness of it all, between the moment we knew we were lost and the moment when the vessel went down. Yet every moment between was used to a nicety, almost as if Captain Macnaughten had been preparing for the test. He commanded us, crew and passengers alike. Four stokers had been killed below: another and the engineer officer badly hurt. These two were fetched up while some of us lowered the accommodation-ladder and others swung out the boats on the davits. These two sick men were carried down to the first of the three boats launched. Four women passengers followed; three married, one a spinster. The three husbands were ordered down after them.

"The _Eurotas_, as I've told you, was a new ship, well found to the last life-buoy. The directors of the Company had lunched on board before she sailed and drunk to her health, having seen that everything answered to advertisement. The boats were staunch, newly painted and smart: the crew as well-picked a lot as the Board could find. So far as I can recall those hurrying minutes, I remember them as being almost intolerably slow. I cannot say how many of them it took before we realised for a certainty that the ship was going down. But I know that as, by order, I went down the ladder to the second boat, I had a sense of irritation at the long time it was taking and the methodical way the skipper was getting out stores and water-breakers and having them hefted down.

"Another thing I must tell you. As I went down the ladder--the ship's bows already beginning to dip steeply--I had a sense of being in no _time_ at all, but in eternity. There around us, spread and placid, stretched the emptiest waste of the Pacific, with God's sun deserting the sky above it, sinking almost as fast as the ship was sinking.

"Santa had wrapped her mantilla over her head. She went down the ladder before me, following Farrell. Our boat was white-painted on thwarts and stern-sheets. . . . I was keeping my foothold with difficulty, loaded with a water-breaker. . . . A man took it from me, all in silence. I gripped Farrell's hand and hoiked him on board. There was a great silence hanging, as it seemed, about those last moments.

"We pushed off a little way. The third and last boat was lowered down, and we saw the last half-dozen, with the captain at their heels, tumbling down in a stampede.

"The _Eurotas_ took her plunge just as we heard them unhook from the davit-blocks."

NIGHT THE SIXTEENTH.

CAPTAIN MACNAUGHTEN.

(Foe's Narrative Continued.)

"I once read a novel called _One Traveller Returns_. That's all I remember of it--the title.

"Well, I am that traveller: and if ever I write down the story of the _Eurotas_, and in particular of what was suffered on board her boat No. 2, I have no doubt that nine readers out of ten will forget the details just as soon and just as completely. There is a horrible sameness about these narratives, Roddy; and the truer they are (as I've proved) the nearer they resemble one another. Monotonous they are--these drawn-out agonies--as the sea itself upon which they are enacted. From time to time you sit up half-awake out of your stupor, and then you know that something is going to happen, and also that it is something you've read about somewhere, something that you've _lived_ through (or so it seems) in dreams, or in a previous existence. You hardly know which; and you don't care, much. It's going to be horrible, you know: it's going to be all the more horrible, in its way, for being conventional. You want to get it over and pass on to the next stereotyped nightmare. That's the feeling.

"So I'm going to confine my tale pretty closely to myself and what pulled me through. . . . But before I get to this I must tell you of two shocks that fell on me before I came to it, and seemed to promise that the books were all wrong and not half vivid enough. I dare say that quite a number of survivors have tried to paint the sense of loneliness that swooped on them in the first few seconds after their ship had slid down. But I'll swear I had read nothing to prepare me for it. . . . It's not a ship--it's a continent--that vanishes. The little hole it has made in the water calls to the whole ocean to cover it, and the ocean widens out its horizon by ten times all around, at once pouring in and spreading itself to isolate you ten times farther from help. . . . Nobody who hasn't been through this and felt it for himself can understand how promptly and easily-- without help of quenching their thirst in salt water--men go mad, in open boats, at sea.

"But I believe the shock of loneliness at sunrise was even more hideous. One is prepared for it, in a way; otherwise it would, I am sure, be far more hideous. Santa confessed to me, on the second day, that she had felt--and, she believed, could feel--nothing more dreadful. As she put it, 'You see, my friend, when the sky lightens at length, you have assurance of God, and that God is help. Then, when He sends up no help, but a great staring sun to watch your misery, hour by hour, God turns to devil and you only long for night--when, at least, the dew falls.'

"Between sunset and sunrise, however, I was kept fairly busy. For the _Eurotas_ had scarcely been twenty minutes under water, and night had barely fallen, before the captain's boat ranged up to us. She carried a lantern in her bows, and I had found one and was lighting it after his example.

"'Names on board!' he demanded. We gave them through Grimalson, the second mate, who was in charge. He said no more for about half a minute, during which time no doubt he was running through the list in his head. Then, 'That's all right,' he announced cheerily. 'You'll set watches, Mr. Grimalson, and keep her in easy hail. The weather will certainly hold fine for a bit, and early to-morrow I'll be alongside again with instructions. Plumb south our course lies, for the present. I'll tell you why, later. You have a sail?"

"'Ay, sir,' answered Grimalson.

"'Right. But don't hoist it unless I signal. . . . Yes, yes, not a draught at present. But if a breeze should get up, don't hoist sail without instructions. We keep together--that's the main point. Just pull along easy--I'll set the pace--and keep in my wake, course due south. Those that aren't pulling will act wise to trust in God and get some sleep. . . . Is that Doctor Foe there forra'd, with the lantern?'

"'Ay, sir,' I answered up.

"'Then as soon as you've fixed it, sir, I'll ask you to jump aboard and along with us for to-night. I've poor Jock Abercrombie here-- fetched him and Swainson out of No. 1 boat'--These were the two injured men: Abercrombie, our Chief Engineer, by far the worst burnt--'I doubt if he'll last till morning: but we've been friends from boys, Jock and me, and if you can do aught, sir, to make his passing easier--'

"I asked him to wait while I fetched my medicine-chest, and was transhipped with it into the captain's boat. They had laid Abercrombie in the stern-sheets, with the stoker Swainson beside him. Abercrombie's plight was hopeless; flesh of chest and arms all red-raw from the scorching, and the man palpably dying from shock.

"'I had him into my boat, sir,' Macnaughten explained gravely, 'because we'd shipped the ladies--all but Mrs. Farrell--in No. 1, and I don't want 'em to be distressed more than necessary. . . . A man can't think of everything all in five minutes, but I got him out of it, soon as I could. There's no hope, think you?'

"'Between you and me, none,' said I, sinking my voice.

"'That's what I reckoned,' said the skipper, with just a nod of his head. He had taken the tiller and sent all the crew, saving four men rowing, forward whilst I examined the patients. 'Jock wouldn't be one to let out a groan if he knew there were women by to be scared by it. . . . Also, Doctor, if he's dying, I'd like to be handy by, if you understand. I got him this berth. We were friends, always.'

"I found some cotton-wool and a tin of vaseline, and coated the poor man's hurts as well as I could. Then, as he still groaned, though more feebly, I got out my phial of morphia and a needle. As I held the bottle against a sort of binnacle-light by which Macnaughten sat steering, I caught his eyes staring down on me, quiet and solemn. I tell you, that man was a man, Roddy.

"'Yes, I know, Doctor,' he said quietly. 'You're calculating how much there is of it, and how you may have to use it before we're through. . . . What about Swainson?'

"'He'll pull around,' said I. 'The vaseline will ease three-fourths of his trouble within ten minutes.'

"'Keep your voice low,' said the skipper, 'as I'm keeping mine.' He bent forward, pretending to consult the compass. 'I've sent all these fellows forward, though they put her down by the head so that it's like steering a monkey by the tail. . . . Now I reckon that you'll be wishful to go back to-morrow, or as soon as may be, and join your party. That's so?'

"'That's so,' said I, as I finished the injection and turned to deal with the stoker.

"'Well, I'd like to have you here aboard,' said the skipper. 'But so's best. We want some brains in No. 2 boat; and, between ourselves, Grimalson hasn't the brains of a hare. He's a second-cousin-twice-removed of one of our directors. He's no seaman at all; and his navigation's all a pretence. . . . I suppose, now, _you_ can't navigate?'

"'Good Lord, no, sir!' said I. 'I just understand the principles of it--that's all.'

"'It's a damned sight more than Grimalson understands, I'll bet,' responded Captain Macnaughten, studying the binnacle and speaking as though we were discussing the weather and the crops. 'You may push your finger into that man anywhere, he's that soft and boggy--no better'n slush--_and_ pink. . . . Don't you despise a pink-coloured man? Still, I want you to understand, Doctor, that he's the superior officer on No. 2, for the time being.'

"'I understand,' said I, looking up from my business of unguenting the stoker, who was not badly burnt.

"'But if Grimalson should turn rotten. . . . Well, now, I've had an eye on you, sir, and I judge I can share off on you a bit of trouble I wouldn't share off on most. . . . _You_ must know as well as I do that the chance is pretty thin for us all, even if this weather holds. I reckon there's no nearer land than Easter Island, four hundred good miles norr'ard, and a beat in light winds. . . . I've heard too much about long beats in open boats--heard enough to make the flesh creep. Anyways, I'm responsible. I've turned it over in my head: and I'm giving orders--you take me? We're not steering for any land at all. We're steering the shortest way, due south--what wind there is drawing behind us--on the chance to hit in with the way of traffic--Sydney ships making round the Horn. . . . You'll not argue that, I hope?" he demanded.

"'On the contrary, sir,' I agreed, 'I just know enough to be sure that you are doing the wisest thing.'

"'Nobody but God can be sure,' said he, and sat musing. 'Well, I take the responsibility God has seen fit to lay on me of a sudden. You won't hear me speak of this again: but you're an educated man, and you've nerve as well as brains--I marked ye by the head of the ladder, when the first boat was getting out. I reckoned you for one that doesn't speak out of his turn; and it came over me, just now, that I'd like one such man, and him a gentleman, to bear in mind that if I set my face pretty hard in the time that's ahead of us, it won't mean that I ain't feeling things at the back of it.'

"'Thank you, Captain Macnaughten,' said I, pretty earnestly. 'The best I can answer is the simplest--that you're doing me much honour.'

"'That's all right,' he said lightly: 'all right and understood. One man often helps another in funny little ways in this funny old world.' After a pause he went on yet more lightly and cheerfully, 'Well--and I've noticed you've a trick of beginning your sentences on that word 'well': it's a habit of mine too, they tell me--as the ladies say ashore, we're going to be worse before we are better, so we'll call those fellows aft a bit and ease the steering. . . . Stay a minute, though, before I call to them. . . . A clever man like you ought to be able to pick up a bit of navigation in a few lessons. While our boats keep together (as, please God, they will to the end) it wouldn't be a bad notion if you dropped alongside just before midday for a morning call, and I'll learn you how to handle a sextant and prick down a reckoning. . . . It'll be sociable, too. . . . Yes, I'll signal the time to you: but, to be ready for it, you might set your watch by my chronometer here. . . . I wonder, now,' he inquired oddly, 'if you've forgot to wind yours up to-night?'

"Well, Roddy, it's the truth that I had forgotten. I looked at him, pretty foolish, and with that we both laughed--yes, there and then, a sort of laugh, low and quiet, like well-water bubbling.

"'Now I'll tell _you_,' said the skipper, 'I caught myself winding up mine the moment after the ship went down . . . that's funny, eh? Five minutes to nine was the hour. . . . I'd hooked the old timepiece out of my fob, and there I was, winding, for all the world as if ashore and going to bed. . . . See here--three turns of the winch and she's chock-a-block again, if you ever! . . . And, come to think, I may as well correct _her_ by the chronometer, too.'

"So we solemnly set our watches together, there by the binnacle light. A queer fancy took me that the act was a sort of ritual, not devised by either of us--a setting and sealing of friendship. . . . Ought a fellow, Roddy, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, to complain while he has these three stand-by's--a woman to love, a man to admire, and a man to hate?"

"The engineer died just before dawn. Indeed, the day broke of a sudden as I finished straightening his body and wrapping it for burial; and I looked up in the new light, and around me, to take in that second gush of loneliness of which I told you. . . . It was appalling. It swept in on me from the whole enormous circumference of empty waters, and I fairly cowered from it over the corpse I had been tending.

"I never had that sensation again, or in anything like that degree, during the whole voyage; and I shall presently tell you why. But it was Macnaughten who taught me my first deliverance. . . . I knelt there, huddled, not daring to turn my face up for a second look and expose my cowardice. I seemed to be drowning in the deep of deeps, and fragments of the first chapter of Genesis swirled past me like straws--_And the earth was without form and void. . . . And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God saw the light, that it was good_--but here it was, and it was not good. _And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters_-- but there was no firmament. _And God divided the waters . . . and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good_--oh, my God! _And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let dry land appear: and it was so_--But it wasn't!

"Captain Macnaughten's voice spoke through this misery of mine quite matter-of-factly and simply, dispersing it like so much morning mist.

"'Signal the other boats to pull close,' he commanded. 'Someone tell me where the Bible and Prayer-Book were stowed. I saw them handed down, with my own eyes.' Then to me: 'These things--packed as we are . . . the sooner over, the better, and the less they'll prey on anyone's mind.' He looked down. 'Jock would have liked it so, I reckon.'

"The other two boats were called close. The summons was explained, and the burial service decently read. 'It don't seem altogether a lively beginning,' said he to me at the close--and the water was scarce dry on his cheek that had run down suddenly as he read out _I heard a voice from heaven, saying_--'But,' he added, 'it'll sober 'em down to what they'll have to face. . . . And now we'll sober 'em up with some cheerfuller business no less practical.'

"The boats having gathered close for this ceremony, he commanded them to stay so while the crews cooked breakfast. 'I saw the coffee handed down into No. 1,' he announced. 'Fetch it out, you! . . . And, after breakfast, I'll overhaul all three boats and see that each has her share fairly apportioned.'

"I tell you, Roddy, that this Macnaughten, who aboard the _Eurotas_ had been an ordinary skipper conning his ship, and nowise hearty or communicative, of a sudden proved himself as great as any man I've read of in history. . . . You may smile if you will. But here was a man abandoned by Heaven in the waste of the South Pacific, with all his prospects blasted and all the hopes built on the _Eurotas_ line (in which, I learned, he had piled his money); with a wife at home, moreover, and a daughter. Yet for the seven days we kept company he stood up to duty, fathered us all, never showed sick or sorry. He had a fairish baritone voice, and it was he that started us singing to fill up the endless time. How does it go?--"

Thus sang they in an English boat, A holy and a cheerful note--

God! I can hear his voice now, trolling _Nancy Lee_ back across the waters, defying them, until the night quenched it.

"Through these seven days, regularly and towards noon, he signalled and I went aboard No. 3 for a lesson in navigation. It was the third day that, returning, I found Grimalson didn't stomach these visits. Grimalson was a mean man, and incompetent; the sort that knows he's not trusted, knows there's good reason for it, and resents it all the time. I thought him just a sulky brute, and noted that on some excuse or other it was always inconvenient to be close up with No. 3 boat as it drew towards midday and my time (as he put it, growling) for 'taking the Old Man's temperature.' He was misguided enough, on the fourth day, to let off a part of this rather feeble joke upon the captain himself, and found his bearings pretty smartly. He had so managed things that at ten minutes to noon it became pretty clear I must miss my appointment. All three boats carried sail now: the weather being perfect, with a nor'-westerly breeze, light but steady: and the three were running before it pretty well abreast like three tiny butterflies on the waste of water--for I should tell you that all three were twenty-four footers, built to one whale-boat model on the same moulds, and carried small Bermuda, or leg-of-mutton sails, cut to one pattern--when Grimalson took it into his head that our down-haul should be tautened in, cursed the man who was doing his best to execute a silly order, ran forward, and so messed matters that the sail had to be three-parts lowered and re-set. It was quite deliberately done, as even a landsman could see; and it lost us a couple of hundred yards off the captain's boat, sailing to starboard of us.

"Things were scarcely right with us before Macnaughten had brought his boat about close to wind and came ranging alongside. He had his watch in his hand.

"'Mr. Grimalson,' he demanded, 'why were you fooling with that sail, just now?'

"'She wasn't setting proper,' explained Grimalson; 'and I told Jarvis to take a swig on the downhaul. He got messed up in the slack somehow, and--'

"'Before you go any further,'--the captain cut him short--' I may just tell you that your sail was setting perfectly, and that I saw the whole business through my glass. . . . Hasn't Doctor Foe told you that I require him, while this weather holds, to be on board this boat regularly at ten minutes to noon, to take observations?'

"'Observations?' grumbled the second mate. 'I thought observations to be a seaman's job. I reckoned that what doctors and suchlike took was temperatures, and five minutes up or down wouldn't put anyone out.'

"'I'm sorry,' answered Macnaughten, very quiet, after a moment's thought,--'I am very sorry to tell you before your crew and passengers what, with a ship under me, I should have called you aft and below to hear in private. But if you ever use that tone with me again, Mr. Grimalson, I shall take _your_ temperature with my revolver. And if you dare to disobey my smallest order, as you deliberately did just now, I shall transfer you to this boat and clap you in irons. For it seems to me I have to explain to you what the others,--crew and passengers alike--know by the light of common sense: that until God's mercy delivers us my least word is the Ten Commandments rolled into one, we being where a hand's turn is either a hair's-breadth or broad as the Pacific. . . . Now cast off, and set your behaviour by No. 1 boat, where Mr. Ingpen has come up to wind and is waiting for us. . . . A cable's length on the port, and level with us--that's the order, and you'll watch it until I give the next. You have lost us twenty minutes. Happen _that_ might turn out the hair's breadth I was speaking of--the difference between life and death--and the whole Pacific ain't wider.'

"We were down in latitudes where the current sets southeasterly, and this was helping us all the time. But on the sixth and seventh days, although the wind held fair and light and steady, a considerable swell had been following us, warning of trouble somewhere to northward; and on the eighth night it overtook us.

"It was--not to speak irreverently--in itself ten times more trouble than ten thousand Grimalsons could have raised; a tearing gale of wind which, all of a sudden, converted the oily summits of the swell into bursting white waves. I don't suppose the height from trough to summit actually increased as it did to view, but in twenty minutes, and with night shutting down the lid on us, each successive wave astern seemed to grow taller by feet. The rain appeared to have no effect in flattening their caps, though it came down with a weight that knocked half the breath out of our bodies, and with a roar above which it was hard to hear an order shouted. We could spy the other boats' lanterns but at long intervals, partly because of this down-pouring curtain and partly, I suppose, because when we topped up over a crest they would nine times out of ten be hidden in a trough, dipping or rising.

"We carried, by Captain Macnaughten's orders, a hurricane lamp on our fore-stay. Someone had lit a second amidships, where we huddled in oilskins and under tarpaulins like a congregation of eels. . . . Jarvis, our best seaman, had the tiller. He sat, all hunched, crouching forward over a third small lamp--the binnacle lamp with which our boat, like the others, was providentially fitted. The rain, however, beat on its glass in such sheets that he could not possibly have read the compass card floating by the wick. Nor--I am sure--was he trying to read it. He just sat and steered by the feel of the seas as they lurched ahead and sank abaft. The lamplight glowed up on his cheek-bones, but was lost under the pent of his sou'wester, which had a sort of crease or channel in its fore-flap, that shed down the rain in a flood. Though we lay, we passengers, on the bottom boards we could see nothing of his face, so far forward he bent.

"Then Grimalson lost his head. He was seated at Jarvis's shoulder in the stern-sheets, with a hefty seaman (Prout by name) on his other hand tending the sheet--the both of 'em starboard of Jarvis. Of a sudden he started up, reached forward, snatched the midships light, and held it aloft against the wall of a tremendous sea arching astern. At sight of it the fool lost all his remaining nerve, and yelled to the two seamen forward to lash a couple of oars to the painter and cast overboard. 'If we ran another hundred yards, we were lost: there was no hope but to fetch around head-to-sea and ride to it.'

"--Which, after some seven or eight sickening minutes, we did. He was master, and Jarvis put down the helm and obeyed. Twice we were heaved, tilted and slid sideways down, like folks perched on the window-sills of a falling house. Then she came fair about and rode to it, every crest flinging more or less of spray over us, hour after hour. . . .

"But I must tell you one thing. From time to time we were roused up in the darkness, to bale. Our work performed, we three passengers-- Santa and Farrell and I--would creep under the tarpauling anew, out of the drumming rain, and coil there to sleep. . . . Ay, and once in the pitch blackness under, she, mistaking, reached two arms around my neck and with a long sigh, dead-beat, sank asleep. That was all. . . . Farrell lay as he had tumbled, like a log across my ankles. . . . I held her, crooked by my elbow against my side, her head drowsed on my shoulder, her body pulsing against mine. I am telling you all, and I tell you that I did not dare to kiss her. Lying awake, with Farrell across my feet, I held her to me, feeling her breathe.

"At hint of dawn Jarvis, who had been watching the seas the night through, barked us out of cover. The rain had ceased, the gale had swept southward as fast as it had come. The sea heaved almost as steeply as ever, but the toppling waves no longer flung any spray over us, or any to mention."

"Day broke, and the after-swell still tumbled us heavily: but nowhere within the great ring of horizon did it heave one of the other boats into sight. The sea smoothed itself down with a quite wonderful rapidity, and still its great surface was a blank."

"I cannot somehow believe that so able a handler of his boat as I knew Captain Macnaughten to be allowed himself to be swamped in that gale. His orders had been to carry on and only heave-to upon signal. Jarvis--who (as I have said) could sail our boat running by the feel of her, maintained that we had never been in the worst of danger, that the skipper could sail a boat for ten to his own one, that he had just held on, in his straight way, upon the orders he had given, and left us at the back of the horizon while we fenced seas under Grimalson's orders.

"Since nothing apparently has been heard since of those other boats, I shall go on hoping that Jarvis was wrong, and that Captain Macnaughten's boat and Mr. Ingpen's, in one way or another, met with a short sharp end in that gale.

"But if they did last it out and over the horizon to drag it out and die and never be reported to Lloyd's, then I, who know the sort of things they must have suffered, assure you, who have read them accurately reported in books, that whenever or wherever Captain James Macnaughten perished, the Recording Angel has him entered up for a seaman and a gentleman."

NIGHT THE SEVENTEENTH.

NO. 2 BOAT.

(Foe's Narrative Continued.)

"One must use ugly words for ugly things.

"Grimalson, staring--as we all stared--over the blank sea, vomited the natural man within him in some fourteen or fifteen words for which he was never forgiven by any of us.

"'Gone, by Gosh! And that bloody old fool was teaching _me_ to handle a boat!'

"All heard it. Not a soul spoke. I glanced at Jarvis in time to catch the twitch of his mouth--one of those twitches I used to study in angry dogs, and snapshot and measure: but he continued to gaze across the waters. After half a minute or so he glanced at me, looked seaward again, and observed quietly, 'It don't seem probable they would run mast-down in the time. And yet I don't know: 'twas blowing powerful fresh just after midnight. Hull-down, a boat might easily be; and supposing sail lowered, what's a boat's mast better to pick up than a needle in a bottle o' hay?--let be they might be dismasted. There was weather enough. And No. 1 carried a bamboo-- which is never to be trusted, if you ask _me_.'

"'Who the devil's asking you?' demanded Grimalson.

"'Nobody, sir,' the seaman answered, respectfully, but without turning his head. 'Words spoken in a l'il boat like this be for anybody's hearin'; and anybody's heard or no, accordin' as they choose.'

"'Well then,' Grimalson retorted, 'I happen to be boss here aboard, and I don't choose. So drop you that, prompt, and start baling her.'

"'One moment, Mr. Grimalson--' I began. But he took me up quicker than he had taken Jarvis.

"'Dear me, now!' he snarled in a foolish sarcastic way. 'And who may this be that I have the honour of addressing?--Captain Macnaughten's ghost? or his next-of-kin, belike? Or may be his deputy understudy?--with your _One moment, please_? . . . You sit down on that thwart there, and don't you dare open your face again until I give you leave. . . . That was the old fool's way with _me_--hey? And now you recognise it.'

"'I do,' said I, pulling out my revolver. 'You may quit fumbling in your pocket, for it's wringing wet and these cartridges are dry, as I have assured myself. . . . _You_ sit down on _that_ thwart, and don't you dare open your face until I give you leave to get up and wash it. That's _your_ trick of speech, and maybe you recognise it."

"As I covered him, Jarvis touched my elbow. 'I beg your pardon, sir, but you're a gentleman and a passenger, and Mr. Grimalson's our senior officer, when all's said, _and_ in command. . . . I'm not talkin' about the rights of it nor the wrongs of it,' Jarvis went on, as I still held the revolver levelled:' but 'tis flat mutiny you're committing; and me and my mates'll have to range up on the side of order. Whereby you'll be no match for us. . . . Oh, sir,' he pleaded, 'let up with quarrelling, and let's all die decent, if we must, when the time comes--and with a lady in the boat!'

"'Thank you, Jarvis,' said I; and lowering my revolver drew out the cartridges pretty deliberately. 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Grimalson. I shall not, on any provocation, interfere with you again. But before you start baling the boat, I'll ask you to note that the third water-breaker is stove, and it was the only full one. Saltish this water may be, but nine-tenths of it is honest rain from heaven.'

"'My God, sir, and it's truth!' verified one of the seamen who had scrambled forward. The full breaker had jerked loose from its lashings and lay awash under the bowman's thwart: worse--it had loosed the other two, and these, floating light, had washed away overboard and gone out of ken.

"Grimalson stood up, slightly dazed. In the rock of the boat he seemed to be shifting his weight deliberately from foot to foot.

"'Why didn't one of you report?' he shouted, in a fury at which I smiled; it being so senseless and at the same time so cunning, as a ruse to let him arise with dignity from the thwart. 'Why didn't somebody report?' he repeated in an absurd official manner, quite as though he had been a station-master interrogating a group of porters on the whereabouts of a missing parcel.

"'Well, sir,' I answered as politely as possible; 'it was I that first found the casks were loose, and by the accident that the rim of the full one struck me pretty sharply, in the night, between the shoulder-blades. I got it trigged up, as you see, before it ran amuck to do further damage. In securing it I found that it had lost its bung and was almost empty: but that hardly seemed worth mentioning, with such a flood of rainwater washing around. There was nothing to be done at the moment; the breaker in a way was refilling itself, as soon as I had it jammed, by the water washing over it; and, after a bit, judging it full or nearly full, I ripped off a corner of my oily and made a sort of bung, as you see."

"All this had, in fact, cost me some labour, and I related it, no doubt, a bit too complacently. Worse, I rounded it up by saying, 'The captain, sir, was more anxious about the water than anything, as he told me yesterday.'

"At this his temper boiled over--yet not (as I could see) until he had flung a glance at Jarvis and the crew, to make sure they were submissive still to the old habit of discipline. 'Macnaughten was always full of wisdom,' he sneered; '--so full that he's dead of it! . . . And so you didn't think it worth mentioning?'

"Do you know, Roddy, I didn't think the fool worth any further attention. . . . One can't really hate two men at one time . . . at any rate, _I_ can't. It's too fatiguing. There sat Farrell, three feet away, looking dazed, as he'd looked ever since the _Eurotas_ went under. As for this Grimalson, I didn't reckon him worth powder and shot. I knew that he would bluster before the men, to save his face, and then climb down. To secure the water on board was such an obvious measure that, bluster as he might, he couldn't miss coming to it finally. . . . I heard Jarvis explaining that an empty pork-tub, with a tarpauling inside of it, would hold quite a deal of the rainwater washing above the bottom-boards. I took no more trouble than to turn my back on Grimalson, who was arguing that all this water was mucking the dry provisions.

"'They're pretty well mucked already, sir, by the looks of 'em,' answered Jarvis: 'all but the canned meats, and few enough they are. Five cans, as I counted the last stowage.'

"'Oh, very well, then,' came the order which I had known to be inevitable. 'Run a tarpauling inside of that cask--and bale, you, Prout and Martinez!'

"And so, behind my back and almost as I shrugged my shoulders--so, within twenty minutes of the sunrise that told us we were eight human beings isolated from all help but that which we could afford to one another--in a casual, unpremeditated stroke the curse fell on us.

"The seaman Martinez, kneeling in water, was asking, rather helplessly, for someone to pass him a baler or invent one--our regulation dipper having gone overboard in the gale. It was a silly, useless question: but Grimalson, already rattled, swung round upon a man he knew to be weak. 'Damn me!' cried he in a gust of rage, 'if I can't teach it to doctors, I'll teach _seamen_ who gives orders here!' and snatching out a marling-spike from a sheath in his belt, hurled it full at the seaman's head.

"The act was brutal enough in itself; for the iron, though a light one, was full heavy enough, flung with that force, to lay a man out. It did worse: for Martinez, instead of ducking his head, made a spring to his feet, putting out his hands much as if fielding a cricket-ball. The marling-spike, miss-aimed, struck the thwart in front of him, turned point up with the ricochet, and plunged into his thigh. As I splashed forward to his help, blood came creeping, staining the water around my ankles. The steel point had pierced slantwise through his femoral artery.

"Well, I was quick: and Santa was quick, too--tearing in strips the damp pillow-case on which her head rested of nights when it wasn't resting against Farrell's shoulder. (But not _this_ night, I thought as I worked--not this blessed night just passed!) With the pillow-case and the very spike that had done the mischief I made a good firm tourniquet and saved Martinez's life for the time.

"But he had lost a lot of blood. All the drinking water awash in the boat was foul with it, and this bloodied flood was running, as the boat rocked, in and out among our small bags of pork and ship-bread. My job ended, I looked aft. Farrell was leaning over the gunwale in uncontrollable nausea. The face of Prout at the tiller, was dogged but inexpressive. Grimalson stood like a man dazed.

"'Will he live?' he asked, his eyes meeting mine. 'Of course I never intended--'

"'It wasn't a very pretty thing to do, was it?' I answered quietly.

"'Well, this settles it,' said he, staring down at the water. 'We must clean out this filthy mess and overhaul the stores.'

"'And _then_?' I asked.

"'Oh, it'll rain,' said he, affecting confidence. 'It rained for a hundred last night, didn't it? We've run south of the dry latitudes and soon we'll be getting more rain than we've any use for. There's the small keg of rum, too. . . . Great thing as we're situated,' the fool continued, 'is to keep everyone in heart. And anyway I don't stomach water with blood in it--specially Dago blood. . . . Jarvis and Webster, fall to baling: and you, Prout, hand us over the tiller and dig out something for breakfast.'

"I had found a plug of tobacco in my pocket and seated myself to slice it: and as I cut it upon my palm, my eyes fell on Farrell's yet-heaving shoulders. . . . Of a sudden then it came upon me that, even with the luck we'd carried, men can't go through seven days and eight nights in an open boat and emerge quite sane. Macnaughten had put up a gallant, a magnificent pretence. 'The Old Man's Penny Readings,' as Grimalson had dubbed those evenings when the boats had closed up and the crews sang Moody and Sankey or _My Mary_--'The Old Man's Penny Readings, or Pea-nuts on the Pacific'--had been just as grandly simple as anything in the Gospel. No: that's wrong--they had come straight out of the Gospel, a last chapter of it the skipper had found floating and recovered, and would carry up, a proud passport to his God.

"But Macnaughten was gone, and with him the whole lovely illusion. He had kept us in a nursery, separated from hell by a half-inch plank; and here we were all beasts, consigned to ravening and to die of unsatisfied bestial wants--yes, and commanded by a monkey-man who chattered of keeping everyone in heart! _He!_"

"So there it was. I told you, Roddy, that it all happened like a nightmare--or, if you prefer it, a composite photograph--of any dozen stories you can recall. Here are the facts; and I will try to give them succinctly, as in a police-report.

"We were eight in the boat:"

"Grimalson,--in command. Davis, Prout--A.B. seamen. Webster, Martinez--Ordinary seamen. Farrell, Santa and I--Passengers."

"Our victuals were:--4 lb. of pork (about) and 7 lb. of ship-bread, all messed with blood: 3 cans of potted meat, 2 of preserved fruit, one tin of sardines: for liquid, half a gallon of rum and, in the breaker, about 3 pints of water.

"We were, as we calculated, four hundred miles at least from any known land, and we had no chart on board: we might be within a hundred miles of the fringe of traffic.

"The sea was calm: the wind came in intermittent light draughts from the north. The sky was a great burning-glass, holding no hint of rain."

"Now from the very beginning--from the moment we left the ship--I knew that, if we were to perish of hunger or thirst before sighting help, I should be the last survivor. No; you needn't stare: it's perfectly simple. . . . I doubt if I ever told you that in the old days, when experimenting with the animals, I found that my will--or brain-power, if you prefer the term--worked torpidly for a while after meals, although, as you know, I was never what they call a hearty feeder. So I took to cutting down my rations. Then of course I discovered that this was all right enough up to a point, beyond which the stomach's craving made the brain irritable and impatient. So for a long time I let it go at that, and ate pretty frugally at fairly long stretches . . . until one day, in some book about Indian fakirs, I picked up a hint that if this interval of exhaustion were passed--if I stuck it out--my will might pick up its second wind, so to speak, and work more strongly than ever. I was curious enough, anyway, to give it a trial or two. The results didn't amount to much: but I _did_ discover that I had a rather exceptional capacity for fasting, and promised myself to practise it further, from time to time, as an experiment on my own vile body.

"But now we'll come to something more important. In the matter of thirst I had persevered: being, as you may remember, hot-foot upon rabies just then and the salivary glands. . . . Well, in the matter of thirst, I trained myself to do my three days easy without swallowing a drop. That last night you invited yourself to dinner-- the night I first met Farrell, by the way--you unknowingly ended a four days' experiment. I told Jimmy Collingwood about it, the morning he breakfasted with me. . . ."

["I remember Jimmy's telling me something about it, in the taxi," I put in. "He said you were either the saviour or the curse of society--he wasn't clear which: wouldn't commit himself until he'd read your forthcoming treatise on _Thirst, Its Cause and Cure_. He added that you were mistaken if you thought the topic non-controversial."]

"He needn't be afraid. . . Farrell smashed me up for good as a benefactor of my species. . . . I shall put up a brass plate in Harley Street and end my days as a pottering empiricist--Remember Jimmy's trouble with that word?--alleviating particular complaints for cash. If it hadn't been for Farrell--well, just you remember _that_ when I stand up for judgment! . . .

"Anyhow, that infernal boat gave me all the personal experiment I wanted. . . . I promised not to tell you all about it. . . . Martinez went first, of course, being weak as water. He died muttering for water. Grimalson came next . . . two days later.

"But I shall go on telling you about myself. Physically I suffered very little, mentally a good deal at sight of the others' torments-- but only from time to time. By the fourth day (the eleventh after the _Eurotas_ went down) we were all more or less mad, I reckon. But my lunacy took the form of light-headedness with a strange, almost persistent, sense of exaltation. I kept my strength so much better than they that almost unconsciously they left most of the trimming and steering in my hands. And I sat and steered as a god, in a world blank of all but miserable happenings. I looked on Santa, and she was the woman I loved but should never enjoy. I looked on Farrell: and he was _here_, brought here by _me_. What worse woe could possibly lie in store for him than this agony over which I presided it was impossible to tell and hard indeed to imagine. But I did not want him to die. On the contrary, it was for _him_ that I searched the horizon, that a ship might rescue us and he might live. I would see to the rest!

"They say that living with an enemy in a confinement such as ours, makes you hate him worse and worse. . . . It wasn't so with me. My hate, by this time, was set and annealed, so to speak; quite cold, and almost judicial. I had no more jealousy than Jove. The air that, to the others, quivered so damnably, so insufferably around the boat under a sky without shade, swam around me like incense. . . . As for Farrell, his eyes watched mine like a dog's.

"Oh, yes, we went through it all! I'll have to tell you about Grimalson (as shortly as possible, though), because Farrell gets mixed up in it, hereabouts. Even in their suffering, the three seamen--Jarvis, Prout, and Webster--had nursed poor Martinez almost tenderly; and I suppose, amid their mutterings forward, they had hatched out their form of protest. And it was fit for comic opera-- ghastly comic opera--if you can imagine Lucifer sitting in the stalls.

"Noon of the third day it was--I count from the time of our losing the other two boats. We had lowered Martinez overboard about an hour before, and the seamen should have been preparing our diminutive ration. (Salt pork boiled in sea-water, if you can imagine it, Roddy!) I was steering: Santa sat a foot away, staring over the waters, sometimes bringing her attention back to a line which Grimalson had cast overboard, trying for a fish. Grimalson lounged on the after-thwart--facing me, as you might say, and with his back to the men, but lolling sideways over the gunwale. He felt the line with his left hand. Close by his right lay a useless gaff. He had exhausted our third and last tin of sardines for bait, without effect, and--what was worse--had drained the oil down his throat impudently, without an offer to share it. Also he had been drinking salt water--and I had not troubled to restrain him. Farrell I could hate, but this man was naught. Farrell lay on the bottom-boards at my feet, breathing stertorously, with his head in what shade Santa's gown and the side-sheets together afforded. But this fool seemed intent on baiting the Pacific with a plummet, a hook, and a lump of salt pork.

"As if this wasn't enough of grisly opera, of a sudden, in my light-headedness I saw the three men stand up, join hands solemnly in a sort of cat's cradle fashion, and advance aft, for all the world like a comic trio, with the after thwart for footlights. They came to a halt, close behind Grimalson, and--even as though I had ordered a burlesque--Jarvis cleared his parched throat painfully, very formally, and spoke across to me. You must picture the three, if you will, still holding hands while he spoke.

"'Doctor Foe, sir,' said Jarvis oratorically, 'me and my mates, not knowing the law, but being wishful to behave conformable as British seamen, have cast it up together. And we allow 'tis no mutiny, being situated as we are, to say as this Martinez was a shipmate, when all's said and done, though a Dago, and Mr. Grimalson, meaning no disrespect, done him to death by bloody murder. Which, consequently, attaching no blame, we three, as loyal British seamen, two A.B. and one ordinary, and giving our opinion for what it is worth, hold that Mr. Grimalson was probably off his chump when he done it, and hasn't behaved subsequently in a way to inspire confidence in a crew left as we are. Whereby, Doctor Foe, not having pen and ink handy to make a round robin of it, we hereby respectfully depose Mr. Grimalson, and request of you to take over command of this craft, trusting you to be a gentleman and being well aware of the consequences and ready to face 'em. The others having said _Amen_, we'll consider the matter finished.'

"There's farce somewhere in every tragedy, Roddy. Here, against the glare on the Pacific, it challenged all doom, broad and unashamed. I need hardly tell you that Grimalson, at the opening of this harangue, had dropped his fishing-line, clutched his gaff, and whirled about furiously. But he faced three determined men, and Webster's loose hand played with a revolver. Twice or thrice Grimalson essayed to interrupt; but Jarvis was a man with a prepared speech: and, backed by Webster's free hand, he delivered it straight out at me to the last word over Grimalson's shoulder.

"Then, as he concluded, there ensued the beastliest scene of all. Grimalson, from facing these three slow, determined men, took a swift turn right about and struck at me with the gaff. They clutched at him and he faced about again, dropping the gaff, springing to the thwart and hitting right and left. Webster sprang also to the thwart and landed him a stunner on the point of the jaw which sent him overboard from the rocking boat.

"Now Webster was, in ordinary life, a religious man, and a Methodist. At sight of what he had done he ran to the boat's side, making ineffectual grabs to recover the body, which floated for a moment or two, with the senseless hands afloat or spread on the waters, as if in ghastly benediction. And then, as I put up helm, as if hauled down on a line, the trunk and head disappeared from view and a bloody smear came up, oozing and spreading. Jarvis called out that he had seen a shark's fin.

"I did not see it, being occupied in rounding up the boat to recover the body: doing this, too, with my left hand, in no small pain. For Grimalson's stroke with the gaff had lacerated my right fore-arm, tearing away a strip of my rolled-up shirt-sleeve.

"And then. . . . My God, Roddy!--Farrell, who had roused himself up at the scrimmage, had his mouth fastened on my arm, mad with thirst, sucking the blood! Oh, you have to go through these things to understand! . . . And I said I wouldn't tell. . . . I beat at him; but it was Santa who pushed him off.

"Webster had sunk, sobbing, with his face on his hands that gripped the gunwale. We were all mad. I held out my bleeding fore-arm to Santa, who was tearing a bandage for it.

"'Your husband has drunk,' I said.

"'Ah, pity!' said she, softly, taking the first deft turn of the bandage. 'Must you, too, be a beast?'

"Jarvis, meanwhile, like a man dulled to all tragedy had gone to the boat's side and was hauling in Grimalson's futile line. He brought up the sinker.

"'God help us all!--there's hope yet!' he barked through his parched throat, and held up the sinker all clothed about and clogged with greenish-brown shore-weed."

NIGHT THE EIGHTEENTH.

"AND SO THEY CAME TO THE ISLAND . . ."

(Foe's Narrative Continued)

"That night, as I was steering, I heard a sound as of a bucket dipped over the bows. Needless to say, we had hoisted no lantern on the forestay since the night the other boats had driven away from us or gone down. To help a vessel to pick us up on that expanse of water it would have been about as useful as the tail of a glow-worm--and moreover the crew _had drunk all the oil_.

"I had the sheet well out and was running under a light, lazy night-waft of breeze. A thin moon was setting somewhere behind my right shoulder, and the glimmer of it played on the canvas. . . . I had supposed all the others to be sunk in merciful sleep, when Webster stood up and, staggering forward, ducked under the foot of the sail, which at once hid him from me. . . . When I heard the _plunk_ of a bucket--as I supposed--it suggested at the worst that here was another fool dosing himself mad on sea-water; and, as values counted by this time, it was not worth while to awake four other souls to consciousness and misery for the sake of preventing him. . . . And then the man's face went swimming past me, upturned to the moonlight, momentarily sinking as I grabbed at his beard which floated up like seaweed. . . . I grabbed, and missed. God knows what I should have done had my fingers tangled themselves in that beard, to get a clutch on it.

"He had slipped himself overboard, to drown quietly. . . . And we were now five, and Prout was plainly a dying man. (I'd have you note, Roddy, the order in which the men on board went; for it rather curiously backs up my theory that there's ever so much more vitality in what we call brains than in what we call physique.) Martinez was a weakling, of poor breed: Grimalson, big as bull's beef, had a brain rotten as a pear: Webster, a docile fellow, was strong as Hercules and surprisingly stupid. These were gone, in their order. The two A.B.'s, Jarvis and Prout--canny men, resourceful, full of seamanship--survived, and we three passengers. What kept Farrell going, and saved his reason, was a great capacity for sleep. He slept all the night and most of the day; and though by consequence he helped us little or nothing, seemed (as he declared himself to be) constantly dog-tired. His momentary ferocity, when he fastened on my bleeding forearm, had been a gust only, and after it he sank deeper and deeper into drowsiness. As for Santa--frankly, I don't know. They tell us that women sleep more lightly than men, and can endure suffering far more patiently--which some explain by saying that their nerves are less sensitive to pain, and (I suppose therefore) to pleasure. But I don't know: I have never studied the subject. She sat very quiet, sometimes for hours together, without stirring; but she took very little actual sleep.

"The end of Jarvis and Prout was one of those inhuman, ghastly farces which, as I've said, break the spell of a sudden and are worse than the tragedy itself. They had struck up a quaint, almost canine friendship--Yes, that's the word, though I can't stop to explain what I mean by it more than by saying that they would sit together by the hour, like two dogs before a fire. The odd thing about it was that they had twice been shipwrecked before on the coast; and had come through the double experience respecting one another as capable seamen but forming no attachment until--But it's ludicrous past guessing. On the second day in the boat it was discovered by a chance word that they had a common acquaintance in 'Frisco: and he wasn't much of a friend either. I never heard his name right and full, and I doubt if they knew it. They called him Uncle Tibe, and I gathered from their earlier conversations that he was a Jewish dealer in marine stores and a money-lender; of mature years; and afflicted with a chronic and most Christian thirst, which he alleviated by methods derived from the earliest patriarchs of his race. Of these his favourite was to attach himself to some young seaman with money in his pocket and, having insinuated concurrently the undoubted truths that he possessed great wealth but was averse to spending it (even on Scotch 'smokes'), to insinuate further that the victim had to an extraordinary degree crept into the affections of a childless old man,--yea, might hope indeed, by attentions which in practice worked out to ordering whisky and adding 'Make it two,' to inherit his real and personal estate.

"Silly as you like!--But the discovery that each had been hoaxed by Uncle Tibe, and the comparison of their foolish experiences, with reported tales of the dupes yet more heavily befooled and bled, caught and bound these men in fellowship. They had both met with some queer ones in their travels, and they compared notes: but they always came back to this superlative old fraud. After long wise and disconnected talk about the set of the wind, or the rates of pay on various lines, or stowage, or freights, or rigs, or currents, or the characters of various skippers and mates, or the liveliness or sulkiness or homeliness or fickleness of this or that kind of cargo, they would revert extra-professionally to Uncle Tibe: of whom the old stories would be repeated over and over, with long pauses, chuckles, slow appreciations--'Ay, Tibe! . . . He was a none-such, if you like!'

"Will you believe me that, in the end, these two honest fellows murdered each other over this more-than-half-mythical Tibe? No, you can't guess what it's like, towards the finish. They sat side by side on the mid-thwart, fishing over either gunwale--or leaning over, pretending. They were almost too weak to haul in a fish over four pounds had they caught one, and for two days their throats had been parched so that speech came with difficulty. Of a sudden Jarvis let out 'Tibe!' with a sort of ghostly cackle, and Prout cackled 'Tibe!' in an echo even thinner. . . . And, with that Jarvis stood up and started raving of what he would do when the money came to him, as he allowed it would, after all. Mighty queer ways of spending wealth he mentioned, too, before Prout was up and, yelling at him for a thief and supplanter, drove at his throat with a knife. He missed: but the next instant, these two fond friends, whose friendship had fenced us others off almost as strangers, were wallowing and knifing one another on the bottom-boards,--all over the visionary legacy of a Jew, thousands of miles away, whose picking of their pockets had been their common reminiscence and their standing joke through days of horror! And political economists used to tell us that money is a medium and symbol of exchange!"

"Well, after that we were three in the boat, and I was the only one strong enough to heft the bodies overboard. If they could only have held on to their wits for another twenty-four hours, or even for twelve!

"When I had done this work, and redded up the boat, I looked rather anxiously at Santa, who had been watching me: for I feared the effect this scene of shambles might have upon her. She sat, with Farrell's head resting against her knee, and still gazed unmoved. . . . Then I knew why. She had passed beyond these vain phenomena. Her eyes saw them and saw them not. . . . She was dying.

"Yet she sat erect. She even smiled, very faintly, and made a feeble motion of the hand towards her guitar-case, which I had lifted out of the reach of the blood and set on the seat at a little distance from her. Then I understood that she _had_ seen, after all. . . . For I must tell you that, in the early days, Santa's playing and singing had brought great cheer to the crews, and our boat was envied for carrying this music. But there had come a day when Jarvis and Prout sent aft very respectfully to beg that there might be no more of it, for it dragged across their raw nerves: and from that hour the guitar had lain in its case. It could be set free now.

"I took it out, and she half held out her arms for it, as a mother might for her newly-born child. . . . But she would never play on it again. The strings were all loose but one, and that one broken. She had no strength, and I no skill, to re-tune the thing.

"But she thanked me in a sort of throaty whisper, and sat for a while letting the neck of the guitar lie against her shoulder, while her left hand went up to clasp it and finger it in the old way. And her right hand lifted itself once or twice towards the sounding-hole, but dropped back to her lap.

"'You are very good to me,' she said, after some seconds, still in the same whisper. 'Why is it that you hate Pete so?' Then, as I did not answer, she went on, 'I am dying, I think. It would be quite safe to tell me, now.'

"'When two men love one woman--' I began. But she shook her head, and her eyes accused me. Santa had very beautiful eyes, and in this agony they were perhaps deeper in colour and more beautiful than ever. But they had changed, somehow. . . . I cannot explain it but they recalled another pair of eyes . . . another woman's. . . . Whose? . . . I don't know! My mother's, maybe. She died, you know, when I was quite a small boy. . . . Anyway, these eyes quite suddenly looked at me out of the past--out of my memory, as it were. They were Santa's and yet they were not Santa's. . . .

"'Ah,' said she, 'do not lie to me, now! It hurts so!'

"'Well, then,' I told her, 'your husband once, back in the past, did me a very great wrong. It--well, it wrecked the work of my life, and I have never forgiven it. Now let us talk no more about it.'

"A look of relief, almost a happy look, dawned on her face. 'I _knew_ it was not about me! For I saw your two faces when you met on the hill, under my porchway. . . . Do you know that, at moments, you are very much alike? . . . Oh, in general, of course, there is no likeness at all. . . . But at certain moments. . . . And it was so when you met, there on the hill: I had to look from one to the other. It was plain in that instant that you hated one another--yes, and it might have been for a long time . . . ages and ages. But it could not have been about me, for you had not set eyes on me but within the minute. . . . I am glad, anyway, that it is not for my sake that you hate.'

"Her words came in faint, hurrying wafts, much as for days the wind had been ruffling after us. The sunset struck slantwise across her cheek and hung entangled in the brown tress that drooped low by her right temple. I tell you, Roddy, that if the old gods and goddesses in our school-books ever turned out to be mortal after all, she was one, and thus looked, and spoke as she died. . . .

"'I understand well enough,' she went on, 'the small things over which women quarrel. . . . Though they all seem very far away just now, I was a woman and could be jealous over _any of them_. But I never understood why _men_ quarrelled, except for me, of course. . . . Was it over your work, do you tell me?'

"'Surely,' said I, 'a man's work--'

"'Yes. I know that it is so,' she answered me with a small sigh. 'Do you know that, far back, I come down from the Incas? and I dare say they thought less of work than of other things. . . . It is all thanks to your working that we three are alive, now. . . . I understand a little why men so much value their work. . . . But yet I do not understand why they drop their work to quarrel as they do. I understand it no better than the fighting of dogs.' She paused on that last word, and then, as though it had put new life into her, she sat erect and opened her eyes wider upon the horizon as she put the amazing question, 'Was it over a dog that you two hated?'

"It staggered me: but I caught at the first explanation. 'Oh, I see,' said I. 'Your husband has been telling you?'

"She didn't answer this at once. . . . At length, and as though my voice had taken long in reaching her, far out on the ocean where her gaze rested--'No,' said she, 'Pete has told me nothing. ... I never asked. . . . But if it is true, _ay de mi!_ then that which I behold is not true.'

"'Of what are you speaking?' I asked.

"'I saw an island,' she answered, as one in a dream: 'and again I see it. It has two sharp peaks and one that would seem to be cut short. Lawns of green climb up to the peaks between forests. There is a ring of surf all about the shore . . . but the boat has found a passage through . . . and you and Pete are landing . . . and-- strangest!--there is a dog leaping about on the shore to welcome you.'

"I was silent, not caring to break in upon her happy delirium. 'But I am not there,' she whispered, almost in a moan. 'Why should a dog be there and not I?' Still getting no word from me, she turned her eyes full on mine and repeated the question imperatively, almost indignantly. 'Why should it be a dog?--and not _I_, over whom you never hated?'

"'Santa,' said I, 'if there were such an island as you see--'

"'But there _is_,' she interrupted quick as thought. 'There _is_, and it is near, though I shall not see it, except from the boat.'

"'Say, then, that there is such an island--' said I. It was just possible: for during the last two days we had sighted many sea-birds.

"'And near--quite near,' she insisted. 'It has groves of coco-trees, and streams tumbling down the rocks--on which no boat can row with men cursing in her and fighting with knives.'

"'Then you shall land on that island, O beloved!' said I, 'and we will live on it, and love--'

"'Ah, I know what you mean! You mean as they love in heaven? Yes.' And she added quite simply. 'I have had great trouble with men.'

"'Not exactly as in heaven,' said I, and took out from a breast-pocket under my jumper a small flask of yellow Chartreuse, which I had snatched up among other small belongings from my state-room locker ten minutes before the _Eurotas_ went down. I had nursed it with a very jealous purpose. . . . Farrell should not slip through my fingers by dying, while I could yet force a stimulant down his throat, to linger him out. . . . It was a tiny 'sample' flask, and had been pressed on my acceptance, as a small flourish of trade, by a German wine-dealer in Valparaiso. . . . And here at the crisis, with Farrell dying at my feet, on an instant I renounced my purpose.

"'Drink this,' I commanded Santa, 'and you shall live some hours yet. And then, if there _be_ an island--'

"She caught at it with a delighted cry, her hands suddenly vitalised. The guitar slid down from her lap. She drew out the glass stopper, holding the flask up a moment to the setting sun and letting it blaze through the liquid. Then swiftly, as I made sure she would carry it to her lips, she bent over Farrell and whispered some soft word of the night that pierced his stupor so that he stirred and lolled his head around. . . . Yes, and for a farewell kiss--which I watched without jealousy. . . .

"But as their mouths drew apart, and before his swollen lips could close again, she had slipped the mouth of the flask between them and the cordial was pouring down his throat. . . .

"She had defeated me. . . . I watched her without uttering a word. Farrell let out a guttural sort of _ah-h!_ and sat up somewhat higher against her knee, opening his chest and breathing in new life as the Chartreuse coursed through his veins. Santa turned the flask upside-down, and handed it to me.

"'I have won!' she said softly. 'Men at the last are--what is the word?--magnanimous, mostly: and that is why a woman can usually win in the end.'

"'You have thrown away,' said I, 'so much of life as I gave you, renouncing much. You have sacrificed yourself.'

"'That was _my_ share of the price, my friend. Now continue to be great, as for these many days you have been good. There is a bad pain about my heart. With that other small bottle of yours, and with that needle I have seen you use . . . You will? Ah, how much better it is to be friends than enemies, when the world--even this little shrinking world--is so wide yet--so wide--'

"So I took her wrist and, she scarcely wincing, injected the last drop of my morphia: yes, Roddy, and kissed the spot like any poor fool, she not resisting! . . . Her last words were that I should lay the guitar back again on her lap. . . . Oh, damn it, man! it was everything your damned sneerer would choose to call it. . . . But I tell you I held my ear close to her breast for hours; and in my light-headedness I heard the muted music lulling her: and in and out of her breathing, when she was long past speech--and above the stertorous snoring of my enemy laid at her feet--I heard distant waves breaking in a low chime to some words of a verse I had once quoted to her on a night when her song had made the crews sorrowful for a while before lifting their hearts again to make them merry--music to ripple, ripple:"

'--Ripple in my hearing Like waves upon a lonely beach, where no craft anchoreth; That I may steep my soul therein, and craving naught, nor fearing, Drift on through slumber to a dream, and through a dream to death.'

"My ear was close to her breast, listening, as the last breath went out with a flutter . . . and Santa was dead, having conquered me-- conquered me far beyond my guessing; but up to the moment having subdued me so effectively that my sole kiss of her had been taken, kneeling, upon the wrist, as one kisses faith to a sovereign, and had never been returned. Through the night I held her wrist until it was cold."

"Towards dawn, and just at that moment when a watcher's spirits are at their lowest, Farrell stirred, stretched out his legs, drew them up again, and asked how things were? . . . For his part (he added, sitting up weakly), he felt a different man.

"'It behoves you to be,' said I with some sternness. 'Take the tiller and--yes, you may hold on to it with some firmness. Your wife is dead.'

"'Santa!' he gasped. 'Oh, my God!' and cast himself upon her body, seemly bestowed as I could serve it.

"'Get off of it,' I shouted, 'before I brain you!' I held the very gaff with which Grimalson had torn my arm. He had plucked the tiller from the rudder-head, and with these two weapons in our right hands we faced one another, each with his left feeling for the revolver he carried.

"Then Farrell, who stood facing the bows, shot out his right as if jabbing at me with the stick, a foot short of my shoulder. The action was, as a stroke, so idiotic that, although it might so easily have meant death to me, I turned half-about to where the stick pointed, as the helmless boat yawed.

"And there, above the low-lying wisps of morning fog, stood three peaks: two sharp and the third blunted: and, below the fog, ran a thin white ribbon of breaking water!

"We had run down upon it so close in those hours of darkness that the beat of the surf had, as I now recognised, confused itself into Santa's last breathings: so close that, as the sun took swift mastery of the mist and dissolved it, disclosing, below the peaks, the variegated greenery of lawn and forest pouring down to the seamed cliffs and pouring over them to the very beaches in tapestries of vines and creepers, we were almost in the ring of the surf: and it came as a shock to me that the lazy swell on which we had so long lifted and dropped, heeding it least among many threats, could beat on this islet so terrifically.

"The sight so vanquished Farrell that he yielded the stick over to me, obedient as a child. I thrust it back in its socket, hauled sheet and fetched her up close to the wind outside the surges. . . . Without a word said, he turned to pointing out this and that inlet between the reefs where there seemed a chance to slip through.

"For two miles at least we fended off in this way, until we came to the base of the hill which, from seaward, had appeared so curiously truncated. As we opened its steep-to sides, they rounded gradually into a high curve at the skyline, and, at the base, into a foreshore of tumbled rock through which ran a cleft with still water protected by sheer rocks--a narrow slit, but worth risking with the wind to drive us straight through. So I upped helm on the heave of a comber, and drove her for it, the walls of rock so close on either hand that twice the end of our short boom brushed them before Farrell, who held the sheet, could avoid touching. . . . And then, rushed by a heave of the swell through this gorge, we were shot into a round lake of the bluest water I ever set eyes on; a lakelet, rather; calm as a pond except by the entrance, where the waves, broken and spent, spread themselves in long ripples that melted and were gone.

"You know Lulworth Cove? Well, imagine Lulworth, with a narrower entrance, its water blue as a sapphire shot with amethystine violet, its cliffs taller, steeper, hung with matted creeper and, high aloft, holding the heaven in a three-part circle almost as regular as you could draw with a pair of compasses. We were floating in the cup of a dead volcano, broken on the seaward side; and broken many hundreds of years ago--for on our starboard hand, by the edge of the rent, swept down a slope of turf, cropped by the gales, green as an English park; with a thread of a stream dropping to a small wilderness of ferns, and, through this, to plash upon a miniature beach of pink sand, on the edge of which the sea scarcely lapped. Sea-birds of many kinds circled and squawked overhead. Yet it was not our boat that had frightened them.

"They had risen in alarm at the sound of barking, high up the slope. A dog came leaping down it, tore through the fern, and, as our boat drew to shore, raced to and fro by the water's edge, barking wildly in an ecstasy of welcome. A yellow dog, Roddy--a largish yellow dog--and, as I live by food, the living image of my murdered Billy!"

NIGHT THE NINETEENTH.

THE CASTAWAYS.

(Foe's Narrative Continued.)

"A miracle? Well, I had always supposed poor Billy to be a mongrel of such infinite variety of descent that the world might never hope to behold his like. But, after all, the strains even of dogs are limited in number; and what Nature has produced she can reproduce.

"But the apparition, just there, and at that moment, was a miracle to me. I sat staring at it even when the boat's stem took the beach gently, and it was Farrell who first crawled over her side to land. His knees shook, and the dog, leaping against him, nearly bowled him over. Then the sight of water seemed to galvanise his legs, and he tottered frantically up the small foreshore to the cascade, beside which he fell and drank, letting the spray drench his head, neck, and shoulders. The animal had gone with him, gambolling and barking, and now ran to and fro and leapt over his body three or four times, still barking. All his welcome was for Farrell. To me, as I followed, staggering, the animal paid no heed at all, until he saw me drawing close, when he suddenly turned about, showed his teeth and started to growl. His tail stiffened, the hairs on his chine bristled up, and I believe in another moment he would have flown at me.

"Partly of knowledge, however, and partly of weakness, I checked this. My feet had no sooner felt firm ground than I found myself weak as a year-old child. The strength of will that had held me up through that awful voyage--and it was awful, Roddy--went draining out of me, and the last of my bodily strength with it, like grain through a hole in a sack. As the dog bristled up, I fell forward on hands and knees, laughing hysterically, and the dog winced back as if before a whip, and cringed. . . . You know, I dare say, that no dog will ever attack a man who falls forward like that, or crouches as if to sit, _and laughs_? . . . So I dropped from this posture right prone by the edge of the basin hollowed by the little waterfall, and drank my fill.

"What next do you guess we did? . . . We rolled over on the sand under the shade of the cliff, and slept. . . .

"We slept for three mortal hours. I've no doubt we should have slept oblivious for another three, had not the making tide aroused me with its cool wash around my ankles. The sun, too, was stealing our resting-place from us, or the comfort of it, cutting away the cliff's shadow as it neared the meridian. . . . The boat, utterly neglected by us, had floated up, broadside on, with the quiet tide, almost to our feet. The dog sat on his haunches, waiting and watching for one or other of us to give sign of life.

"I roused up Farrell. . . . My first thought was for Santa's body, laid within the boat on the bottom-boards. 'Are we man enough, between us, to lift her out?' I asked. 'Or shall we moor the boat and climb for help? . . . There are certainly people on this island, since this dog must have a master somewhere.'

"'She is a light weight,' said Farrell simply. 'Let us try. . . . Her soul forgive me for leaving her, even so long as I have, in that horrible boat!'

"So, weak as we were, we managed to lift Santa's body ashore and carry it up the few yards of sand beyond what we judged to be a faint tide-mark, close under the ferns. . . . After this we fetched ashore the tool-chest and some loose articles that we judged to be necessary--such as the cooking-pot, binoculars, and a spare coil or two of rope and a ship's mallet; and Farrell searched the undercliff for sea-birds' eggs, whilst I gave the boat a cleansing with baler and sponge, redded her up after a fashion, and finally moored her off with a shore-line, some twenty yards out on the placid water. While thus occupied, my mind was wondering what kind of people inhabited this island, and why they kept such poor watch. . . . We had run in openly in daylight, and yet it would seem that only this dog had spied us.

"If they were savages, why, then, I had only my revolver with a fair number of cartridges. . . . Some of my stock I had blazed away during the last two days in vain attempts upon the life of the sea-birds that ever wheeled out of fair range. The tool-chest, indeed, contained a shot-gun, or the parts of one: but I had never pieced them together, for the simple reason that all the cartridges belonging to it had, through Grimalson's careless stowage, been soaked and spoilt during the night of the gale. . . . Somehow, I could not mentally connect savages with the ownership of this dog. But the day wore on, and still no one hailed us from the cliffs or the green slope.

"Now I must tell you that the boat's locker yet held a chunk or two--less than a pound--of brined pork, hard as wood and salt as the Dead Sea, that none of the crew at the last had a thought to boil in the sea water, which only made it more intolerable. None of us, indeed, after a trial, had been able to get a morsel past our swollen tonsils. But I had a boxful of matches in my trouser pocket, half-emptied: and, as it turned out, Farrell had preserved another. So in this most vital necessary we were well supplied. Therefore, when Farrell, with the dog at his heels, came back along the shore, holding up two cray-fish that he had taken in a rock-pool at the turn of the tide, I tossed the gobbets of pork overboard to desecrate the clear depth. Indeed, apart from fish and fowl, I had seen as we neared the island that we had no fear of starving: for an abundance of cocos and palms grew all around the ridge of the crater and had but to be climbed for as soon as we found strength. The tool-chest contained a saw and a hatchet.

"It also contained an engineering-tool, part pick, part digger. I handed it to Farrell, and he understood. 'But first,' said I, 'let's make a fire and fill the pot. There's a plenty of small dead wood everywhere, and we're too weak just yet to heave this gear any distance up the slope before sunset. We'd best light a fire here; and when we have it started, I'll mount the slope some little way where I see a plenty of limes growing. I may go some way farther, to prospect. The smoke of the fire ought to attract the attention of these very careless islanders; and if they turn out to be unfriendly, well, I have my revolver and you'll have ample warning to clear off to the boat.'

"'Savages?' muttered Farrell. 'I never thought of that. . . . Go you up, if you will, and take the dog for company. You can leave me to light the fire, and--'tisn't a request I've dared to make to you since God knows when--but if you've any pity anywhere in your bowels, just now I'd like to be alone.'

"'I haven't,' said I: 'but I have some sense in my head, and I'm going to prospect. I'll leave you at anchor here for an hour or so.'

"I whistled to the dog, and the dog, after long hesitation and having been thrice shoo'd in my wake by Farrell, followed. But he hung some twenty yards behind, and showed no sign of desire to lead me to the people to whom he belonged. By and by he came to a dead halt and, for all my whistling and calling, broke back for the beach again and disappeared at a gallop. . . .

"I held my ascent, still beside the downward-pouring stream, and on my way noted fruit-bearing trees in plenty. I reached a point where the volcanic hill ran down landward in rounded ridges, and crossed two or three of these: but no sign of human habitation could I discern.

"When I descended again to the beach, with the lap of my jumper full of limes and wild grapes, it was to find the dog stretched beside a sizable fire and Farrell busy nailing together some lengths of long timber. I had heard the sound of his hammer from half-way down the slope.

"'Good Lord, man!' said I, staring. For he had pulled in the boat and sawn almost the whole of the port-side out of her. 'You have cut us off now, whatever happens!'

"'You don't imagine,' said he, 'that I'd ever set foot in that blasted boat again?'

"What is more, he had cut a couple of cloths out of the sail, for a winding-sheet. . . . But the pot was near to boiling; and after we had supped on the crayfish and the fruit, he fell to work again, nailing together a rough coffin. He explained that he had served his time in quite a humble way before embarking in business, on borrowed capital, as a tradesman. Then, under the risen moon, by the scarcely audible plash of the beach, he told me quite a lot about himself and his early days, as he fashioned a coffin for the woman into whose arms I had driven him, as I had driven him with her corpse to this lost isle.

"In the midst of it I said, 'You know, I suppose, that she saved your life?'

"He checked his hammer midway in a stroke, and stared at me, the moonlight white on his face.

"'You know,' I repeated, 'that she gave her life to save yours?' and I told him how. At the end of the tale, if ever hatred shone in a man's eyes, it shone in Farrell's; and yet there was incredulity in them too.

"'What!" he gasped. 'And you let her do it, there in front of you, when with a turn of the hand--O my God!' he broke off. 'I've thought at times you must be the Devil himself, you Foe: but I never reckoned you for as bad as all that! The wonder to me is I don't kill you where you sit.' He clenched the hammer, and twice again he called on his God. The dog growled.

"'Steady!' said I, showing him the revolver. 'Steady, and sit down. You can't kill me, my good man, unless you do it in my sleep--against which I'll take precautions. So you may quit wondering on that score. . . . And I can't kill you; for you're too precious--doubly precious now, _having been bought with that price_. . . . Sit down, I tell you, and order that infernal dog to be quiet: else I'll pump some lead into him and, dog against dog, you may count it quits.'

"'Quits?' he echoed.

"'In the matter of two yellow dogs only: and I have given up keeping pets, having _you_. . . . Now listen: Did you ever guess that I loved your wife?'

"It took him like a blow between the eyes. 'No, I didn't,' he answered slowly, and then with a sudden rush of malignity, 'I wonder it didn't occur to you, then--I wonder you didn't try to--to--tamper with her.'

"'You would,' said I. 'It's the sort of man you are, you Farrell. The next thing, you'll be capable of wondering if I didn't. . . . Pah! and _you_ call _me_ Satan!' I spat. 'Now, take hold on your fool head and think. For _her_ sake I grant you ease of that suspicion, though in dealing with you it would be priceless to me. Think what a peck of torture I'm letting run to waste, as that waterfall yonder runs to waste in its basin. But it wouldn't be true. Your wife was an angel. Drink that comfort--drink it into every cranny of your soul. . . . And now hold your head again. I loved Santa, I tell you.'

"'You let her die,' he muttered sullenly.

"'Think, you fool--think!' I commanded. 'If she had lived, you would have died, and she would be sitting where you are sitting at this moment, and I here, and the moon swimming above us two--Would you have had it so?'

"'My God!' he blurted, wiping the back of a hand across his eyes. 'This is too much for me. . . .'

"I stood and picked up the engineering tool. 'For me, too,' said I, 'it is enough. . . . Now come and choose the spot, and I will fall to my part of the work.'

"But to this he demurred, saying vaguely that he was upset; that the spot for the grave must be chosen with care and by daylight; that he must first finish the coffin, and then take some rest. There would be time enough after we had breakfasted.

"I believed that I understood. . . . He wished to wash and wind the body. So at dawn--by which time the coffin was ready--I told him that he should be alone for a couple of hours, and went up the hill again in the first light, to prospect. Again I tried to whistle the dog after me: but this time he refused even to budge.

"I climbed no farther than before; that is, a little beyond the ridge. For it gave upon a wide undulating valley to the slopes of the second crater, which again partly overlapped the cone of the third or highest. To descend and cross this first vale would cost from two to three hours' hard walking, and my design was merely to con the prospect for sign of those inhabitants to whom the dog must belong. For he was little more than a puppy in age. Also, though lean, he was not at all emaciated: but the traces of rabbit-dung on the slopes told that a deserted dog might manage to sustain life here. Also it promised that the island was inhabited, and by white men, for rabbits are not indigenous anywhere in the South Pacific. They must be brought.

"I studied the hollow and searched it with my binoculars for some while: but without picking up any trace of mankind. Far below me a sizable stream here showed itself through the tropical vegetation as it hurried down to a hidden cove. The wide ocean spread southward to my right. Of how far the island might stretch beyond the taller and more distant cone I could make no guess.

"A desire for sleep came upon me, and I stretched myself in the shade of a bush under the lee of the ridge. After an hour's nap I rose and descended again to the beach.

"Farrell sat by the fire, cooking breakfast, the dog watching him. There was no coffin, nor any sign of a grave, and the tide was making. He had made haste to bury Santa during my absence. . . . He said not a word about it, and I did not question him. But he had played me this trick. Henceforth I felt no further pity."

"You may remember my saying, Roddy, when I first started to tell you about Santa, that it was impossible for me to hate Farrell worse than I did. Well, I thought so at the time. But now on the island I was to find myself mistaken, and this trick of his set me off hating him in a new and quite different way.

"I believe now, looking back, that this was the real beginning of Santa's revenge; or the first evident sign of its working; unless you count the behaviour of the dog--of which I will say more presently. At any rate I had no longer that cool godlike sense of mastery over the man which had sustained me in the boat. It may sound incredible: but whereas, cooped in that narrow shell of boards, I had found his presence gratifying, here on an island of wide prospects, where we could have parcelled out a kingdom apiece and lived by the year without sight of one another, I found it irritating and at times even intolerably so. He had found power, through her dead body, to give me a grievance against him, when I had supposed him too low and myself too high for anything to affect me that he could do. . . . It is always a mistake, Roddy, to falter once in an experiment. It is disloyalty in a man of science to renounce one at any point. Now, I had renounced, in handing Santa the flask; and again I had faltered, in a moment of generosity when I left him beside her corpse. . . . And of that act of generosity--and of delicacy, too, by the way--this thief had taken advantage.

"Oh, yes--I know what you will be wanting to say--that the man was her husband, hang it all! . . . I answer that he _had been_ her husband and my darling's flesh I had resigned to him, as was meet and right. . . . But if you'll understand--if you've ever read what the Gospel quite truly says about marriage, to take it in--the man had no tyrant's monopoly beyond the grave. She was mine now--his, too, if he would--but mine also by right of my great love for her.

"You see, I am shaking, even as I speak of it. I had this grievance, and it festered and raised the whole temperature of my hate. . . . And this wasn't the worst, either. The worst was a sense that, lying somewhere with closed eyes under the ebb and flow of the tide, my beloved was working against me, watchfully, by unguessable ways, and weakening me. There was this dog, for example. . . . Yes, _that_ had been the first token. How had it passed from me--this power over animals that had used to be exerted so easily?"

"But I had not lost my power over Farrell, although there were times when I mistrusted it. His eyes had given me the first warning, when I returned that morning and found myself tricked. They were half-timorous but also half-defiant, and wholly sly. It disconcerted him that I made no comment on his silence and asked no questions.

"On the fifth morning--by which time we had picked up enough strength to attempt a day's exploration of the west side of the island, and within an hour of the time fixed for our start, he found me fitting and nailing a short cross-plank to the boat's mast.

"'Hallo!' said he. 'What job are you spoiling there? I'm the carpenter of this party, or believed I was.'

"'And I'm the captain,' said I; 'and duly appointed--though I have no witness but you to the fact--if you choose to lie about it. . . . I'm doing a job which you have neglected: fixing a Cross for Santa. It will be a comfort, as we fare inland, to know she has a Christian mark over her grave. . . . You have the bearings accurate no doubt,' said I, lifting the heavy cross and, as I stooped to shoulder it, picking up the ship's mallet, which lay at my feet. 'Will it be here--or here?' I asked, choosing the spot and prodding the sharpened foot of the cross into the sand. . . . His face blanched. 'You accursed fool!' said I, 'do you suppose I haven't, these four days, been watching you and the dog?'--and, as I said it, the point of the mast struck upon timber. 'Come and help me to drive it deep,' I commanded. 'If we can work it down within reach of mallet, three taps will drive it so that it will stand firm above such tides as reach this anchorage of hers.'

"He came down the beach heavily and we heaved our strength together, driving the cross down by the coffin's head. 'The mallet is handy by you,' said I. 'Pick it up and use it while I hold steady.'

"This work done, without another word between us, we returned, picked up axe, saw, and a wallet to collect any specimens of fruit we might find on our way, and, still without a word, breasted the hill side by side, the dog running ahead of us.

"We got no farther that day than to the stream which ran between our hill and the second volcano, the edge of which--like that of our own broken and truncated one, ran down steeply to the western shore. The wood beside the stream grew so thick, interlaced with tendrils of tropical plants, that we were forced to turn aside and make for the coast in hope to find a crossing.

"We descended into the sound of the beating surf before we found one: and there an impish fancy took me. I had been losing grip on Farrell, and despite my small triumph of that morning, I felt a sudden desire to test him. Pretending that my purpose was only to cross and report, I waded the stream and dodged upward through the undergrowth; recrossed it, about a hundred yards above, crawled another yard and again recrossed, all to baffle the hound's scent, since from Farrell I could have hidden by this time securely enough. In a very few minutes I heard his voice hallooing to me, and then the dog's yelp began to chime in with it. By and by the beast, well baffled, was baying hard through the undergrowth between me and the surf.

"After a while of this play I crept out and strolled easily back to my first ford, my hands in my pockets.

"'What the devil's up with your beast?' I asked, wading across to the bank on which Farrell stood.

"His face was white. 'My God!' he said. 'I thought, for a while, we had lost you!'

"Then I knew that he dared not be alone, and that I had him, whatever happened."

NIGHT THE TWENTIETH.

ONE MAN ESCAPES.

Before continuing Foe's story, I should warn you not to be surprised that hereabouts it takes on a somewhat different tone. I am trying to give you the tale as he told it: and so much of it as related to Santa, he told bravely and frankly, here and there with a thrill somewhere deep beneath his voice, and exaltation on his face. He was, in short, the Jack Foe of old days, opening out his heart to me; and all the more the same because he was different. By this I mean that never in life had I heard him speak in just that way, simply because never in life had he brought me this kind of emotion, to confess it; but, granted the woman and the love, here (I felt) was the old Jack opening his heart to me. It rejuvenated his whole figure, too, and, in a way, ennobled it. I forgot--or rather, I no longer saw--the change in him which had given me that secondary shock when he walked into the room.

I cannot tell you the precise point at which his tone altered, and grew hard, defiant, careless and--now and then at its worst--even flippant. But it was here or hereabouts, and you will guess the reason towards the end.

Another thing I must mention. You have already guessed that the tale was not told at one sitting. Between the start and the point where I broke off last night, we had lunched, taken a stroll Piccadilly-wards, done some shopping, and chatted on the way about various friends and what had happened to them in this while--Jack questioning, of course, while I did almost all the talking. It was in the emptying Park, as we sat and watched the carriages go by, that he told me of Santa's burial and what followed it, so far as you have heard. I broke off last time at the point where he broke off, stood up, and said he would tell me the end of it all over dinner at the Cafe Royal, where we had called, on the way, to reserve our old table.

I saw afterwards why he had arranged it so: as you will see. But for the present it only needs remembering that what follows was told in a brilliant, rather noisy room--at an isolated table, but with a throng of diners all around us.

I had ordered wild duck as part of the dinner: and when it came to be served he looked hard at his plate, and, without lifting his eyes, slid from casual talk into his narrative again:

[Foe's Narrative Concluded]

"Wild duck--? good! Yes, we used to have wild duck on the island. . . . There were lagoons on the east side, fairly teeming with them, and we fixed up a decoy. I don't pretend that we fixed up an orange salad like this, with curacao: but in the beginning we practised with limes, and later on I invented one of sliced bananas, with a sort of spirit I brewed from the fruit. Also we found bait in the pools, not so much unlike the whitebait we've been eating--I used to frizzle it in palm oil. And once I achieved turtle soup. . . . He was the only fellow that, in two years, we ever managed to collar and lay on his back; and the soup, after all was no great success. But turtle's eggs. . . . I can tell you all about turtle's eggs. That dog had a nose for them like a pig's for truffles.

"Don't be afraid, Roddy. In this sophisticated den of high living and moderate thinking I'm not going to give you the Swiss Family Robinson; though I could double no trumps and risk it on the author of that yarn--whoever he may have been--if he had only dealt from a single pack, which he didn't. Farrell and I didn't build a house in a tree, because we didn't need to; and we didn't ride on emus, because we didn't want to, and moreover there weren't any. But we did pretty well there for two years, Roddy: and could say as Gonzalo--was it Gonzalo?--said of another island, that here was everything advantageous to life. And we found the means to live, too.

"I may say that I took the role of Mrs. Beeton: hunted for fruits, fished, told Farrell (of my small botanical knowledge) what to eat, drink, and avoid, and attended to the high cuisine. Farrell, reverting to his old journeyman skill, sawed planks and knocked up a hut. When one hut became intolerable for the pair of us--for in all that time we never ceased hating--he knocked up a second and better one for my habitation. He was my hewer of wood and drawer of water. Also it was he who--since I professed no eagerness to get away--did the conventional thing that castaways do: erected a flag-staff, and hauled piles of brushwood up to the topmost lip of our volcano, for a bonfire to be lit if any ship should be sighted, lest it might pass in the night. I had resigned the binoculars to him, but he never brought report of a sail.

"On two points--which served us again and again for furious quarrels--the fool was quite obstinate. He would not budge from our first encampment--that is to say, out of sight of Santa's grave; and he flatly refused to fit new planks to the ruinated boat which now lay, a thing of ribs, high and dry as we had hauled her close underneath the fern-brake beside the cascade. Again and again I pointed out to him that, patched up, she would serve me for fishing. To this he answered, truly enough, that we had a plenty of fish in the rock-pools and a plenty of oysters on the shore. Then I urged that, if we sighted a ship--though it didn't matter to me--we might need a boat to get out to her. He retorted that, though it mattered to him, he would never set foot again in that cursed craft or help me to set foot in her. Finally, one day when I was absent on an expedition after food, he broke her remains to shreds.

"Upon this we had an insane quarrel--the more insane because it all turned on my dwelling on the detriment to his chances of escape and his reminding me of my indifference. We argued like two babies. But I had now another grievance: though it was the devil to me to be falling back on grievances.

"I still held the whip-hand over him in this--I could always thong him by a threat to part company and live by myself on the east side of the island. He mortally feared to be left, even with the dog for company.

"The dog remained a mystery. Although, as time went on, we explored the island pretty thoroughly, we never found his owner, nor any sign of human habitation. The conies which bred and multiplied on the hills were our only assurance that man had ever landed here before us--that is, until we discovered the strange boat: and it was through the dog that we discovered it."

"During the first three months we made no lengthy excursions, being occupied in cutting and sawing timber for the two living-huts and a store-hut; in making a small net (this was my task), and in sun-drying the fish I caught in it--for, knowing little about these latitudes, I feared that at any moment the heavenly weather might break, and we be held prisoners by torrential rains, traces of which I read in some of the seaward-running gullies. Also Farrell refused to budge until he had built his bonfire. When this was done we had another pretty fierce quarrel because, tired of waiting, I took a humour to punish him by making him wait in his turn while I did some tailoring. . . . No: we didn't dress in goatskins. There were no goats. But I had visions of piecing up a rabbit-skin coat and, in the meantime, of cutting up the boat's sail into drawers and jumpers, our clothes by this time being worse than a disgrace. But I believe that I held out chiefly to annoy him; and, having annoyed him sufficiently, I gave way to his final argument--that our boots were wearing out fast and, if we didn't make the expedition at once, likely enough we never should.

"So we started on what proved to be a two days' tramp, and thereby came pretty near to wrecking ourselves.

"The third cone, which--in that clear atmosphere--seemed to stand close behind the second, turned out to be separated from it by a good five miles as the crow flies. But on the north-western shore the sea had breached the reefs and swept in to form a salt lagoon in the great hollow, so that we had to fetch a circuit of at least seven miles to the southward, avoiding a tangle of forest in which the lagoon ended, and clambering along a volcanic ridge with the sea often sheer on our right. It was in this lagoon, by the way, that we afterwards learned to take our wild duck, scores of which paddled about quite tamely on its surface, their tameness promising poorly for human hospitality on the farther side of the hill.

"We gained the side of the great cone at length and, rounding it, beheld all the northern part of the island spread at our feet--in form a narrow strip of land curving around a delicious bay and ending in a small pinnacle of high tumbled cliff and wood. Quite obviously this bay was the one anchorage in the island for any ship of burden; and no ship could have asked for a better: for it made almost three parts of a circle, and, while not completely land-locked, held recesses in which any gale might be ridden out.

"Here, if anywhere, as I told Farrell, we should come upon human life or the traces of it: here, if anywhere, if vessel ever made this island, to water, she would drop hook. 'Fools we have been, to waste months pitching camp on the other side, when this is the place of places, and this hill gives the citadel prospect of all!'

"Farrell sat down on a rock and broke into curses. 'Damn you,' he moaned, 'for bringing me so far! I wish I had never seen it. Wasn't it comfortable enough where we were? . . . And now I can't go back!'

"I had taken the binoculars and, engaged with the view, for a moment paid no heed. I was accustomed to his explosions of fury, as he to mine. But, turning about for a while, I saw that he had unlaced his left boot and was holding it out. . . . The sole had broken loose in our scramble over the tufa rocks, and hung parted from its upper.

"'That's bad,' said I. 'Well, I stuck a ship's needle in the tool-bag here before we started--_you_ never think of anything! When we get down to the shore we'll see what can be done: that is, if we don't find a cobbler.'

"'Cobbler? you funny ass!--' he began.

"'Look here,'--I stopped him. 'If you won't attend to me, attend to Rover. What's up with that dog of yours?'--for the dog which had been following all day pretty obediently, except for a wild dash down to the lagoon to scatter the wild duck, had of a sudden picked up bearings and was running forward, halting, returning, wagging his tail, running forward again, turning, asking dumbly to be understood, in the way all dogs have who invite you to follow a trail.

"'Here's business,' said I, and hurried after him, leaving Farrell to limp down the hill-side in our wake. For once the dog recognised me as more intelligent or, at any rate, prompter than his master, and gave his whole attention to me. . . . I tumbled down the hill after him in a haste that fairly set my temples throbbing. Once sure of me, he played no more at backwards-and-forwards, but bounded down the slope towards the innermost southern corner of the bay, where a grove of coco-trees almost overhung the beach. A curtain of creepers bunched over the low cliff at their feet and into this he plunged and disappeared.

"But his barking still led me on; and presently, as I avoided the undergrowth and creepers to follow the foreshore, sounded back to me across a low spit of rock. I climbed this and came all unexpectedly upon a diminutive creek.

"It was really but a fissure between the rocks, with deep water between them and an abrupt, dolls'-house-beach of sand and shells above it, terminating in a flat, overhanging ledge. And on this ledge rested a white-painted boat, high and dry! From the stern-sheets the dog barked at me joyously, wagging his tail, with his fore-feet on the edge of the stern-board.

"I ran to it. Within the stern-board, in cut letters from which the cheap paint had scaled, was a name plain to read--_Two Brothers_. Two paddles lay in her, neatly disposed: a short mast and sail tightly wrapped and traced up in its cordage; her rudder, with tiller-stick, two rusty rowlocks of galvanised iron, and a tin baler, all trimly bestowed under the stern-sheets--and that was her inventory, save a pig of iron ballast, much rusted. How long she had rested there, clean and tidied, half protected from the sun's rays, there was no guessing. But her seams gaped so that I could push my little finger some way between her strakes. She had no anchor; and her painter had been cut short at the ring, sharply. Only the knot remained.

"I was examining this when Farrell overtook me. He came over the rocks, limping; halted; and let out a cry at sight of the boat. Then, as by chance, he peered into the cleft at his feet, into the fathom-deep water past which I had run; and, with that, let out a sharper cry, commanding me to him.

"Down in the transparent water, inert but seeming to move as the ripple ran over it, lay the body of a man, face down, with a trail of weed awash over its shoulders. Peering down through the weed, I saw that a cord knotted about its right ankle ended in another pig of ballast, three-parts covered by the prismatic sand.

"'My God!' said Farrell, and shivered.

"'Well, he's no use to us, even if we do fish him up,' said I, pretty grimly. 'Here's the dog's owner, and that's as far as we get. Since a dog--even so intelligent a pup as Rover here--can't very well attach a weight to his master's ankle and cast him overboard--let alone pulling his boat above high water and stowing sail--we'll conclude that this fellow deliberately made away with himself. As I make it out, the dog, thus marooned, struck pretty frantically for the high ground. Lost dogs--and lost children, for that matter-- always make up hill, dark or daylight. I suppose it's the primitive instinct to search for a view. . . . But anyway, here's a boat. She's unseaworthy, as she lies: but her timbers look sound enough if we can staunch her, and the first thing is to get her down to the water and see how fast she fills. We've a baler, to cope with the leak . . . and when we have her more or less staunch, here's the way around to our camp. Hurry up your wits!' I added sharply.

"'If we launch her here,' he twittered, 'she'll settle down on _that_!'

"'Then run,' said I, 'and, with all the knowledge you ever picked up in Tottenham Court Road, fetch every grass and fibre you can collect, to stuff her seams. I'll do the sailing while the wind's fair offshore, as it is at present. When it heads us, I'll do the pulling. Man alive! think of your burst boot! For my part, I'm willing enough to stay here as anywhere: or you can stay, and I'll start back for camp, and we'll share this island like two kings, you keeping this imperial anchorage.'

"But of course this had him beaten. He helped me launch the boat and ran to collect stuffing for her seams, while I sat in her and baled, baled, baled. . . . It was pretty eerie to sit there alone--for the dog had gone with Farrell--fighting the water, and feel her settling, if for five minutes I gave up the struggle, down nearer and nearer upon the shoulders of that drowned corpse with the hidden face. By sunset Farrell returned with an armful of sun-dried fibre. We hauled the boat high again and he began caulking her lower seams, that already had started to close.

"'She'll keep afloat now for a few hundred yards,' he announced after a while. 'Let's launch her again and run her round the point and beach her. I left a bundle of bark there that, early to-morrow, we'll cut in strips and tack over the seams, and she'll do fine to carry us home.'

"'Home?' echoed I grimly.

"'You know what I mean, you blighter!' he snarled. 'Oh, for God's sake, no--we mustn't start bickering alongside of _that_!' He forced his eyes to look down again at the corpse, and shuddered. 'The tide's going down, too.'

"'It won't go down far enough to uncover _him_: and that you ought to have sense to know," said I.

"'But the farther it goes down the nearer he'll come up, or seem to,' he argued.

"'Well, night's coming on, and you won't see him,' I suggested, playing on his nerves.

"'D'you think I'll sit here in the dark, alongside of--oh, hurry, you devil! Hurry!'

"I chuckled at this. It came into my mind to refuse, and declare I would sit out the night here by the boat. I knew that the shore beyond, though it curved for two good miles, would not be wide enough to contain his agony through the night hours. . . . But I had pushed him far enough for the time. So we launched the boat again and paddled her around and beached her on shelving sand: and soon after, night fell.

"Farrell slept poorly. Three or four times I heard him start up, to pace to and fro under the starlight: and each time the dog awoke and trotted with him. . . .

"But he was up, brisk and early, with dawn; and he made quite a good job of tacking bark over the boat's seams, while I sat and cobbled up his boot with sailmaker's needle and twine. He made, indeed, and though swift with the work, so good a job that, inspecting the boat when he had done, I judged she would stand the strain of sailing-- whereas I had looked forward to a grilling pull in a craft that leaked like a basket.

"At a quarter to ten, by my watch, we pushed off, stepped mast and hoisted sail--a small balance-lug. We carried a brisk offshore wind--a soldier's wind--which southerned as the day wore on, and again flew and broke off-shore as we neared home. I steered: Farrell, for the most part, dozed after his labours. He had not, I may say, one single faculty of a seaman in his whole make-up. He could mend a boat or make an imitation Sheraton wardrobe; but, when the both were made, he'd have sailed the one about as well as the other.

"He dozed uneasily, with many twitchings. Once he woke up and said, 'I thank God he lay so as we couldn't see his face. Would it have been swollen much, think you? . . . Bleached, I make no doubt. . . .'

"'What about worse?' I answered. 'I noticed a crab or two.'

"He put up his hands to his face. 'How the devil can you talk so!' he stammered.

"'It was you who started questions,' said I.

"'Suicide, you think?' he asked, after half an hour's silence, during which his mind had plainly been tugging away from the horrible subject only to find it irresistible.

"'All pointed to it,' I answered. 'As for the motive, we can only guess.'

"'Where's the guesswork?' he demanded fiercely. 'Cast here, in this awful loneliness--' I saw him look around on sea and cliff with a shiver.

"'He had the dog,' said I. 'You find Rover here a companion, don't you? I had a notion, Farrell, that you were fond of dogs. . . . I used to be.'

"We downed sail hereabouts, and pulled in for the cleft and the anchorage we called home. The sea under the smoothing land-wind ran through the passage as calmly as through a miller's leat: and I will own it was happier to be by that shore where my cross still stood over Santa than by the other, where that other body lay, face-down, with the weight whipped to its ankle. "'Wonder who he was?' said Farrell late that evening, as we parted to go to our quarters. 'A missionary, I shouldn't be surprised.'

"'If so,' said I, 'he tumbled on a sinecure. Since your mind runs on him and you want to sleep, make it out that he was a bishop, and home-sickened for the Athenaeum.'"

"I'm coming to the end, Roddy; and you shall have it sharp and quick, as it happened. . . . As I've said, we stuck it out on that island for two years, and a little over, hating one another as two lonely men will come to hate, on island or lighthouse, even when they don't start on a sworn enmity. Oh, you must have been through it to understand! . . . We even quarrelled--and came almost to blows--over the day of the month; though God knows what it helped either to be right or wrong, and, as it happened, we were both wrong by a fortnight or so."

"And then Farrell took ill.

"It was a kind of fever he caught while duck-snaring in the lagoon. He'd start off there for a long day with his dog, the two practising cleverness at the sport. I always felt somehow that, when his grief came, it would come through the dog. . . . Well, he took a fever which I couldn't well diagnose, to say whether it was rheumatic or malarial. It ran to sweats and it ran to dry skin with shivering-fits, the deuce of a temperature, and wild delirium.

"I nursed him, of course, and doctored him, keeping the fever at bay as well as I could with decoctions of bark--quassia for the most part--and fresh juice of limes. But it was the vigour of his frame that pulled him through--as I believe all the skill in London could not have availed to do in the days of his prosperity when he was fat and fleshy. Hard life on the island had thinned him down and tautened and toughened him so that I wondered sometimes, washing his body, if this was indeed the man with whom I had vowed my quarrel.

"His ravings in delirium, however, left no doubt on that score! I tell you I had to listen to some fairly obscene descriptions of myself and his feelings for me--all in the best Houndsditch. . . . Yet here again was a queer thing--again and again this gutter-flow would check itself, drop its Cockney as if down a sink, and, bubbling up again, start flowing to the language of an educated man. . . . The first time this happened it gave me a shock, less the abruptness of the break than by its sudden assault upon my memory. All insensibly, and unmarked by me, Farrell's accent and way of speech had been nearing those of decent folk. They were by no means perfect, but they had amazingly improved. . . . Now, when his delirium plunged him back to Houndsditch, though it gave me a jerk, I could account for it as reversion to an old habit that had been put off before ever we met. What beat me was, that his second style, accent and choice of words--though still fluent in cursing--far surpassed in purity any speech I had heard from him in health.

"And there was something else about it. . . . While the gutter ran Houndsditch, the man was a cur, cowering and yelping out terror under strokes of a whip-lash. When it shifted accent, he lost all this and started to _threaten_. Something like this it would run: 'Gawd! Oh, Gawd, he's after me again. . . . See his rosy eyes follerin' like rosy naphthas. . . . Oh, Gawd, hide me from this blighter. . . . Look here, damn you! I'll trouble you to know who's master here. You will halt where you are, you Foe, and not wag a tail until I give you leave. That's better! Now, if you will kindly state your business at that distance I'll state mine. . . . Is that all? Quite so: and now you'll listen to me, and maybe reconsider yourself . . .' That, or something like that, is the way it would go.

"I had a sense all the while, Roddy, that he was almost slipping through my fingers, and I fairly dug in my nails to hold him to life. On that point my conscience is clear, anyhow. No man ever had a doctor to battle harder for him, or a more devoted nurse.

"Well, I pulled him through, and nursed him to convalescence. I thought I knew something of the peevishness of convalescents: but Farrell beat anything I had ever seen, or heard, or read of. By this time I was worn weak as a rat with night-watching and day-watching: but of this he made no account whatever. He started by using his greater weakness for strength, and he went on to dissemble his growing strength, hiding it, increasing it, still trading it as weakness upon my exhaustion. He came back to life with a permanent sneering smile, and a trick of wearing it for hours at a stretch as he leaned back on the cushions I had painfully made for him of plaited flax and stuffed with aromatic leaves, daily renewed. . . . Yes, Roddy, as a doctor I played full professional service on him, and piled it up with every extra kindness one castaway man could render another. . . . And the devil, as he recovered, lay watching me, under half-closed eyes, with never a sign of gratitude, but, for all my reward, this shifty sneer.

"There came a day when his new insolence broke out with his old hate. 'You Foe,' said he, 'I reckon you're priding yourself on your bedside manner, eh? . . . I can't keep much account of time, lying here. But, when I get about again, I'll have things in this camp a bit more shipshape, I promise you. . . . I've been thinking it out, lying here: and my conclusion is, you're too much of the boss without doing your job. . . . How long is it since you've strolled up to the look-out?'

"'About a fortnight,' said I.

"'And that's a pretty sort of watch, eh?' he continued irritably: '--when you know that I never missed a day. . . . I tell you, Foe, that, after this, we'll have to come to a reckoning. One or other has to be master on this island, and it isn't going to be _you_!

"I went up the hill obediently with the binoculars. I went up thoughtfully. . . ."

"I came back some fifty minutes later, and said, 'You're too weak to walk; too weak even to crawl.'

"'What's the use to tell me that?' he asked, still keeping his air of insolence. 'Drop your bedside manner, and present your report.'

"'I will,' said I. 'One of us two has to be master on this island? So you said, and you shall be he; sole master, Farrell, with your damned dog. . . . There's a schooner at this moment making an offing from the anchorage where, as I've always told you, we'd been wiser to pitch our camp. I guess she put in to water, and I've missed her whilst I was busy curing your body. . . . Well, better late than never! She's hauling to north'ard, well wide: so you'll understand I'm in something of a hurry. . . . You're on the way to recovery, Farrell, and this makes twice that I've saved your life: but as yet you can neither walk nor crawl, and I give you joy of your bonfire, up yonder. In five minutes I push off, alone.'

"He raised himself slowly, staring, and fell forward grovelling, attempting vainly to catch me by the ankles.

"'You won't--you can't! Oh, for God's pity say you don't mean it! Say it's a joke, and I'll forgive you, though it's a cruel one.' Then, as I broke away from the door--'Have mercy on me, Foe--have mercy and don't leave me! _I can't do without you!_'"

"These were his last words that I heard as I plunged down the sand and pulled in the boat's shoreline handover-fist. I had just time to jump in and thrust off before the dog came bounding after me, barking furiously. The brute was puzzled, but knew something to be wrong. He even swam a few strokes, but turned back as I hit at him with a paddle. He made around the curve of the shore, still barking. But I had sculled through the narrows of the passage before he could reach it. I had a sight, over my shoulder, of Farrell, who had crawled to the doorway: and with that I was through the strait and sculling for open water, while the baffled dog raced to and fro on the spits and ledges astern, pausing only to bark after me as though he would cough his heart out.

"In the open water I hoisted sail, with the wind dead aft, and soon, beyond the point, caught sight of the schooner. After running out almost three miles, she had hauled close to the wind and was now heading almost due north. . . . She could not miss me, and yet I had made almost two miles before she got her head-sheets to windward and stood by for me.

"As I drew close, a thin-faced man with a pointed beard hailed me from her after-deck.

"'Ahoy, there! And who might _you_ be, mistaking the Pacific for Broadway, New York?'

"'I'm from the island,' I answered.

"'What ship's boat is that you've gotten hold of?' he bawled.

"The _Two Brothers_.'

"'Lordy! I _thought_ I reckernised her. . . . Then you're old Buck Vliet's missionary, that he marooned.' . . . Shall I go on, Roddy?"

I dropped my cigar into the ash-tray. "You may stop at that," I answered, unable (that's the queer part of it) to lift my eyes and look him in the face, although I knew very well that he was leaning back in his chair, eyeing me steadily, challenging the verdict. "Yes," said I, slowly turning the cigar-stump around in its ash, "I'm sorry, Jack . . . but I don't want to hear any more."

"I knew you would take it so," said Jack quietly, with a sort of sigh.

"Well," said I, "how else? Of course I know you'd had a damnable provocation, to start with. And I'm no man to judge you, not having been through the like or the beginnings of it. . . . You were rescued, for here you are. That's enough. But--damn it all!--you left the man!"

"--And the dog. While we are about it, don't let us forget the dog," said Jack wearily. "Shall we toss who pays the bill? Here--waiter!"

We parted under the porch-cover, in the traffic of Regent Street. I have told you that, in our best of days, Jack and I never shook hands, meeting or parting. It saved awkwardness now.