OVER THE BORDER

                          BY MORGAN ROBERTSON

                             PUBLISHED BY
                          McCLURE'S MAGAZINE
                                  AND
                         METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE




                              CONTENTS[1]
           [Footnote 1: From _Success Magazine_, New York.]


                          THE LAST BATTLESHIP

                          ABSOLUTE ZERO

                          OVER THE BORDER

                          THE FIRE WORSHIPER

                          THE BABY

                          THE GRINDING OF THE MILLS

                          THE EQUATION

                          THE TWINS

                          THE BROTHERS

                          KISMET

                          THE MATE OF HIS SOUL

                          THE VOICES

                          THE SLEEP WALKER







                            OVER THE BORDER




                          THE LAST BATTLESHIP


It was nearly midnight, and the battleship _Argyll_, stripped to bare
steel, was drifting with banked fires but a full head of steam, waiting
for daybreak to discover the enemy. New things were expected in this
coming action. Wireless news had told of the presence of submarines, as
yet unproved in war, and before the going down of the sun a high-power
telescope on board had brought to view two small moving spots in the
distant sky--airships; but whether they were friends or enemies had not
been determined. No hammocks were piped that night--men slept at their
stations or remained awake and talked; and aft on the superstructure
a group of officers off duty discussed the possibilities of future
warfare, and the coming place of the battleship under the menace
of the bomb-dropping dirigible balloon and the invisible submarine
with its deadly torpedo. All had taken part, some with laughter and
joking, others with the earnest conviction of serious thought, and the
discussion finally had narrowed down to a wordy combat between the
highest and the lowest of the commissioned officers, Mr. Clarkson,
the executive officer, and young Mr. Felton, temporarily the torpedo
lieutenant. Mr. Felton had become dogmatic in his assertions, which is
excusable at sea only in the young.

"But, Mr. Felton," said the executive officer, slowly and earnestly,
"have a little common sense. Can't you see that conditions must change,
that the battleship, like the steamship, has almost reached the limit
of size and development, while the airship and the submarine are in
their infancy?"

"But there must be a center, a nucleus of the fleet. How can you
preserve the line of battle without such a backbone? Where will you put
the admiral?"

"Up in the air, where he can see things?"

"And be seen, too, and shot at."

"Felton, an ordinary gas bag can travel faster than the speediest
water craft ever constructed. We cannot hit a destroyer at full speed.
How can we hit an airship above us? Gun sights are useless at such
elevations, even though guns could be pointed."

"All a matter of mathematics. Design new ones."

"And suppose a few bombs come down on deck, or down the funnels;
what'll happen to the boilers?"

"Armor the deck, and do away with funnels. We will soon have internal
combustion engines, anyhow."

"And for submarine attack? Armor the bottom, too? Felton, a battleship
will cease to be a battleship. With that weight of armor she could only
carry the guns of a cruiser without a cruiser's speed."

"But she would still hold the line of battle."

"Until she was further reduced. Then she would not be even a cruiser.
Finally she would sacrifice some of her armor--side armor, we'll say,
because unnecessary--then, with enemies only above and below, she would
lose it all, seal up and dive, or take wings and fly."

"Oh, Mr. Clarkson," said Felton, wearily, "you are a visionary and
theorist. The battleship is here, a perfected fighting machine."

"But she cannot grow much better, while the flying machine and the
submarine have just begun. Imagine the three types starting together.
Which would be chosen?"

"It would depend upon the judgment, experience, and gray matter of the
choosers. I"--young Mr. Felton threw out his chest--"would choose the
battleship."

"Because you never hit one. There goes eight bells. Turn in, Felton,
and sleep it off."

Amid the laughter--for Mr. Felton, as torpedo officer, had not yet
scored a hit in his department--of the listening officers, the group
dispersed, to stand watch, or sleep, until four hours later, when the
striking of eight bells would again bring a change on the watches. It
was Felton's turn in, and he went to his berth; but, hot and excited
over the discussion, he remained awake, tossing and rolling, and
mentally arguing with the impractical "first luff," until one bell had
struck, then two, and finally three. Then he dozed off, and was sound
asleep when the familiar stroke of the bell again rang in his ears.
"Clang-clang, clang-clang."

"Only four bells," he murmured, sinking back for another two hours of
sleep. But he had hardly lost consciousness when the gun-room orderly
tapped at his door.

"Going into action, sir," he said. "You were called, and I thought you
had wakened. All hands are at stations, sir."

Felton sprang out of his berth and dressed hurriedly. Until the enemy
was within the "cruising radius" of torpedoes his station was on the
bridge with the captain. As he ran along the gun deck he heard through
the steel walls of the big ship the faint sound of distant firing, and
when he had bounded up the forward companion steps to the main deck he
could hear the singing of shells, and see through the inky blackness
twinkling points of flame. A crash and a jar of the whole huge fabric
told him that one ship of the enemy had the range, and that _something_
had struck _somewhere_, and penetrated.

There was no time for sight-seeing. The bridge was above him, and
the quickest road to it was by way of the turret, from the top of
which he could swing himself up. He mounted the iron ladder bolted
to the turret, but slipped on the hard steel roof and, with a force
that deprived him of breath, was pressed sprawling on his face. But
a deafening roar of sound from within the turret told him that the
force came from below--from the explosion of a shell and one or more
twelve-inch charges, perhaps the whole magazine in the depths. Hardly
had his dazed faculties grasped this fact than another was borne in
upon him. Gripping tightly the hand-hold of the turret hatch, and
choked with gas fumes oozing through the sight holes in the hood, he
felt that he was whirling through the air, upward and to port, he and
the whole turret roof. As it turned in air he could see for a moment
the dim, bulky outline of the ship below; then it faded into darkness,
and he was clinging for dear life to that slowly canting disk of
armored steel, until, as it assumed a perpendicular, he was holding his
weight with one hand, very curiously, as he then thought, weighing very
little. But he partook of the motion of the whole.

Something hard and rigid brushed him on the shoulder, and in a moment
he was torn from his support to find himself clutching a smooth, round
rod of what seemed to be steel or iron. It was perpendicular, and
beyond in the darkness he made out another, and beyond another. Looking
down he saw a long, pointed platform or deck, to the edge of which the
rods led. He was clinging to the stanchion of an airship, but what kind
of an airship he could not determine.

Thankful for life and a whole skin--though bruised and shocked almost
into unconsciousness--he slid down the stanchion to the deck, and faced
a man in the darkness--a tall man who peered down at his face.

"Hello, who are you, and where'd you come from?" he asked, rather
kindly. "How'd you get aboard!"

"I hardly know myself. I hardly know I'm alive. This is an airship,
isn't it?"

"Yes."

"My name is Felton, torpedo officer of the battleship _Argyll_. There
was an explosion in the forward turret, and I was on top. I went up
with the roof."

"Was that a turret top? I wondered what they were shooting at us."

"It was. I was rifling it. Which side are you on in this mix?"

"The side of the Lord."

The man whistled shrilly, and immediately half a dozen other dark
forms materialized out of the dark. They threw themselves upon Felton,
choked, pinioned, and bore him down, and before he could speak his
protest he found himself bound hand and foot.

"Stay there," said the tall man, who seemed to be the commander, "until
we need to expend weights. We _did_ want a little more ballast."

Felton wisely accepted the situation, and remained through the waning
night where they had placed him. They had not gagged him, and he was
free to roll over and change his position when tired. He lay on what
seemed to be a grating, but on turning to look at it, he found that it
was the deck of the car, through the slits of which he could see lights
below, and the quick gleaming of distant gun fire, but nothing on the
black carpet that took form and identity.

In his immediate vicinity, however, objects were becoming faintly
visible in the first blink of the morning light that had not yet
reached the surface below. He made out the shape, size, and general
construction of the craft that carried him. It was not the conventional
elongated gas bag, with car and motor, rudder, and screw; nor was it
suspended in the air by wings or planes, unless the long, concave roof
above, toward the edge of which the stanchions led, performed some
such function. Amidships were a vertical and a horizontal steering
wheel, aft a noisily buzzing engine, and, behind it in the darkness,
presumably, were the screw and rudders that propelled and guided
the craft. Symmetrically disposed about the deck were long, steel
cylinders that doubtless contained the compressed gas or air that
worked the engine, and through and between them all a system of pipes,
valves, levers, and indicators, as complicated as the fittings of an
engine-room. The tall commander was at the wheel amidships, another man
at the engine, and the rest of the crew, seven in all, were scattered
about the deck "keeping lookout," not ahead, but down.

"There she is," said one, suddenly lifting his head. "Ahead, and to
port."

"I see her," said the captain, peering down and shifting the wheel.

"You see, young man," he said to Felton, "we had to rise so suddenly to
dodge that turret top that we lost sight of her."

"Do you mean to say," answered Felton, cautiously, for he did not yet
understand the temper of these men, "that you can dodge _anything_?"

"We can dodge or outrun a shell, or anything else big enough to see.
But it was dark, and we didn't see that turret coming. It almost hit
us."

"What is your lifting power, captain?"

"The centrifugal force of the earth--partly, inconvenient in one
respect, for we rise at a tangent. We descend by its opposite and
balancing force, gravitation, which is more direct."

"How do you tap this centrifugal force?" asked the amazed Felton. "How
do you overcome gravitation?"

"Gravitation is only one phase of magnetism. In magnetism, repulsion
equals attraction. By reversing our polarity we are repelled from the
earth at the speed of a falling body, but, of course, at a tangent."

"It's beyond me," said Felton. "Of course, that tangent would take you
westward at the speed of the sun."

"In a succession of jumps--yes."

"But how do you change your polarity?" asked Felton, becoming
interested.

"There is your ship down there, nearly beneath us." And the interest
was crushed.

Felton looked down. The light was stronger now, and he could dimly see
on the surface beneath the indefinite outlines of a battleship toward
which the airship was heading. Not a light could be seen on her. Her
fires were quiet; not a flare shone from her funnels. Though there
was fighting at a distance, this craft was not engaged in it. Slowly,
from the lofty point of view, she moved along on a course that crossed
the course of the airship, and slowly the latter turned and followed,
soon dropping squarely in her wake--if such term may be used--a full
half-mile above. The engine now accelerated its speed, increasing its
volume of noise; and this noise must have been heard on the battleship.
A sudden illumination was seen--like a flash of heat lightning--then
came the singing of a projectile, and with it the report of the gun.

"Oh, fudge!" said the captain, gently and pityingly. "Go ahead, boys."

It was now light enough for Felton to examine the faces of these men.
To his surprise they were young, almost boyish. They were not in
uniform. Their dress and faces were as commonplace as could be found
in a factory; only the tall, thin young captain showing in voice and
expression the signs of study and thought. He twirled the wheel,
manipulated levers and valves within reach, and watched, downward
through the slits, the big craft beneath.

The sun was rising in the east, and Felton could make out the details
of the ship below--his own ship, with its familiar bridge, turrets,
and superstructure, and an enormous, gaping hole forward where once
had been the twelve-inch turret. Far to the south and east were other
ships, pursued and pursuing, but which was friend and which enemy he
could not make out. Warships, like bicycles, had become standardized.

A small, round shot was dropped over, and Felton watched it descend
until it disappeared from sight. But soon a scarcely perceptible splash
was seen--a little astern and to starboard, and the captain moved the
wheel and turned a lever. Another shot, or finder, went down, and
this splashed nearer. Then they lifted a pointed shell, vaned like a
dynamite projectile, held it poised until the captain gave the word,
and dropped it. It went down true as a plummet, and went out of sight.
But its effects were soon seen in an uplifting of the quarter-deck
close to the stern, and the rising of a cloud of yellow smoke.

"Nothing left of the steering gear," shuddered Felton. "Wonder how many
were killed in that--and the other."

A six-inch gun on the superstructure was barking away, and shells still
screamed upward, but none came near the airship.

"We'll silence that gun," the commander said, taking out his watch and
slightly changing the course and speed. "Stand by."

They poised another shell, and at the word "drop" down it went. The
commander pocketed his watch, and said: "Now for the rest of her; after
turret next."

Felton heard, but was watching the descent of the shell. It went out
of sight like the others, but soon he saw the uplift of deck, the
yellow smoke of explosion, and a dismounted gun flying overboard.

"My God, captain!" he exclaimed. "Is this legitimate warfare? What
chance has she? She can't hit back. That was the only gun she had with
elevated trunnions."

"And she cost about four millions, didn't she?" answered the captain,
derisively. "Did you ever hear about the boy who was reproved for
clubbing a mule tied to a post? His excuse was that it had no darn
business to be a mule. Mine is that you've no darn business to build
battleships."

"Well, we may build airships, too," said Felton, helplessly.

He said no more, but watched, while his ship was picked to pieces.
The after turret went next, its big guns lifting and falling across
each other. It took two shells to do this, though the second may have
had aid from the magazine beneath; for the whole turret rose with the
explosion. Then the eight-inch turrets, one after the other, shattered
to shapeless lumps under that terrible dropping bombardment; then the
superstructure, with its inclosed armament of six-inch and smaller
guns, received the fire; and when the whole expanse was an uneven
tangle of riven plates, twisted rods, smashed boats, and uprooted
ventilators, the funnels came in for attention. Three open, ten-foot
tubes leading to the vitals, water-tube boilers and steam connections,
one after another belched upward a mighty white cloud, and after each
uprush of steam the dropping of bombs ceased until the steam had
thinned; for in this deadly, leisurely destruction of a battleship, no
bombs need be wasted.

There was still the gaping hole where once had been the forward turret,
and the commander seemed to be studying this, as Felton, sick at heart
and furious with impotent rage, lifted his gaze from the wreck, which,
rolling slowly from filled compartments, smoking with inward flame, and
covered with crawling dots seeking escape from the inferno beneath,
had lately been his refuge and his home--the invincible, impregnable
_Argyll_--queen among battleships.

"I say, there," called the captain to Felton. "What blew up that
forward turret? No gun fire can reach a magazine, and it wasn't I that
did it."

"How do I know? Perhaps it was something else like you," snapped Felton.

"Do you think," and the commander's face took on an anxious expression,
"that it might have been a submarine's torpedo?"

"Find out."

"That's what I'll have to do. We'll go down and see."

One of the men, a big, lumbering fellow with a dull, moon-like face,
came up to where Felton lay and kicked him.

"Don't talk like that to the boss," he said.

"D-- you!" yelled Felton. "You kick a man bound and down. Loose my
hands, if you dare. Loose my hands! I won't need my feet."

"Loose him," called the captain, unconcernedly.

"Give him his way."

The man stooped and unfastened the cord which held Felton's wrists,
then, even as he scrambled to his feet, he released his ankles.

"Now, you dog, take it," he growled, launching his fist at the man's
face. It landed squarely, and the man went down, bleeding. He arose,
but instead of resisting, or making any attempt to strike back, stood
placidly in his tracks while the angry man struck him again.

Once more he went down, to rise again and tranquilly face his
assailant. Felton hesitated, while his anger cooled a little; this kind
of fighting was new to him. But the kick in his ribs flashed into his
mind and the anger came back. "Fight! Fight!" he growled, and again
knocked the fellow down. This time he put all his strength, and the
weight of his body into the blow, with the result that the man reeled
aft past the steering gear before he fell. He sat up and turned his
swollen, bleeding face toward Felton, but did not rise nor speak.

"You've had enough, I judge," said Felton. "Any one else here who wants
to kick me?"

No one answered. They were all looking down, and even the victim joined
in the scrutiny. Not one had seemed in any way interested in the fracas.

"Come on. Who's next?" said the puzzled Felton.

"It is against our rules here to fight," said the nearest man, without
looking up. "We save our energies for the enemy."

"But it seems within your rules to kick a prisoner," answered Felton in
disgust.

"Do you think," asked the captain, raising a troubled face, "that there
are any submarine craft around?"

"How do I know?" answered Felton.

"I don't feel easy, at all," said the other, plaintively.

"How the devil," exclaimed Felton, "can a submarine hurt you?"

The captain looked down without answering, and Felton seated himself to
cool off, wondering, the while, what particular brand of human nature
was embodied in this crew, and half expecting a concerted attempt
to bind him again. But nothing of the kind happened; and when his
breathing and circulation were normal, he, too, looked down on the
spectacle below.

The airship had descended to less than a hundred yards from the sea,
and hung poised, not over the floating scrap heap that had once been a
battleship, but to starboard. One look was enough for Felton; he saw
men writhing among the wreckage, unable to crawl to the rail and end
their agony. Smoke was coming from every aperture, and here and there a
small tongue of flame shot up, and fell back into the smoke. Nauseated
with horror, he closed his eyes, changed his position, and opened
them on the placid sea on the other side--away from the _Argyll_. A
smooth, rolling swell pulsed and ebbed along the surface, and it was
slightly roughened with ripples; but this did not materially lessen the
transparency of the ocean, viewed from a height. Fish were visible,
swimming about in the depths, and Felton thought of sharks, waiting for
the final plunge of that hot and smoking wreck. Far over, a movement
on the surface caught his eye; it was a triangular arrangement of
ripples such as is made by the cutwater of a boat moving slowly. The
apex of the triangle pointed toward the _Argyll_, and it was coming
toward her. As it drew near Felton made out the cause, a short length
of pole extending about three feet out of water and moved by some
power beneath. Then a huge, bulky shape, pointed like a fish, but
foreshortened and distorted by reflection--a darker blue on the blue of
the sea--appeared to view as the source of the motive power.

"There's a submarine, for you, captain," he called grimly. "See the
periscope tube?"

"Where?" yelled the captain, excitedly. "Where is it?"

He sprang to his feet, and looked to where Felton pointed. The others
followed suit, their cries, queries and alarmed faces increasing
Felton's doubts as to their sanity.

"Oh, God help us!" cried the captain, mournfully, as he saw the tube
and the shape beneath. "Jump--jump for your lives! Jump, _you_!"

He pointed at Felton, and sprang toward him.

"Why should I jump?" asked Felton, wonderingly, and prepared for
defense. The others came at him, each shouting his loudest: "_Jump,
jump for your life!_ Overboard with you! Quick, you fool!"

Then one sprang to the rail, poised a moment and threw himself out into
space. Another followed, and another.

"Jump, will you?" yelled the captain, gesticulating earnestly. "I'm in
command. I must be last to go. Over with you. Over with you all."

They were crowding to the rail, where one after another, the rest of
the crew took the leap. And Felton, amazed, alarmed without knowing
why, and against all the dictates of cold reason and common sense,
allowed the captain to push him to the rail.

"Over you go, now," commanded the latter, encouragingly. "Don't be
afraid. I'm coming, but I must be last, you know."

This seemed to be irresistible logic to the bewildered young officer.
With no further thought about the matter, he reached the rail, and
without looking down, drew a deep breath and leaped--a victim of
suggestion.

Three hundred feet is a long jump. He turned over twice in that
terrible descent, and once, looking upward, he saw the sprawling form
of the captain, and above it the quiescent airship. But when he looked
again he did not distinguish the man, and a lessening spot in the
western sky was all that could be seen of the airship.

With consciousness nearly gone he struck the water feet first and was
almost split in two by the impact; but the cold shock brought back
his lapsing senses, and he found himself feebly swimming, in which
direction he could not tell, for it was pitch dark in the depths to
which he had sunk. With aching lungs he swam and turned, looking for
light that would indicate the surface, but saw nothing to guide him,
and in utter despair was about to give up when light appeared. It
was not a dim glow, like diffused sunlight, but a spark, a point of
yellow, that grew larger and became a disk. It was approaching and now
another appeared beside it, fainter, and crescent shaped. On the other
side appeared a third and, dazed with physical agony that reached from
lungs to brain, he recognized the dead lights of a submarine's conning
tower. He looked for the hull beneath, and saw it, a dark blur that was
growing in size.

It came swiftly at him, and just as he was reaching out, to ward
himself from the pointed nose, there was a coughing thud, and something
brushed by him in a blast of bubbles and went on. Then, with many sharp
knocks on head, ribs, and knuckles, he was sucked with the inrush of
water squarely into the open tube that had just discharged its torpedo.
He heard a clang behind him, the shutting of the forward tube door,
then a whistling sound; then he felt the pressure of air on his face
and with a groan of thanksgiving he expelled the long breath he had
taken above, and drew it into his lungs. But the pressure had nearly
burst his ear drums before the tube was emptied of water, and the inner
door was opened. With a gasping call for help, he crawled and hitched
along the tube and men reached in to him. They pulled him out into the
lighted handling room, where, too weak to stand, he fell to the floor,
breathing in deep, convulsive gasps.

A man brought a bottle, lifted his head, and poured a generous portion
of some stimulant down his throat. Felton had just strength to swallow,
and it warmed and aroused him. He sat up and, being a torpedo expert,
had little difficulty in assimilating his first impressions. He was
acquainted with submarines; there was the tube from which he had
emerged, beside it the air flasks and trimming tanks. Amidships the
vertical and horizontal steering gear, and aft the engine and motor.
In this much the craft resembled the conventional submarine that he
knew. But there was this difference--that he noted when able to turn
his head. The boat was stiffened with upright stanchions of about the
size and length of the stanchions in the airship, and placed in about
the same position along the sides. Another similarity struck him at his
first glance around; and he wondered why he had not remarked it in the
airship; the air flasks, trimming tanks, and spare torpedoes arranged
along the sides, occupied the same relative positions as did the steel
cylinders in the other, while the steering gear of both was amidships
and the motive power aft.

"What have you caught this time, Bill?" called a voice from the
wheel--a strangely familiar voice.

"Dunno," answered the man with the flask. "It's a sheep, I think, or
maybe a dog; but it looks something like a horse. Have another drink,
and tell us what you are."

Felton did not refuse a second draught. It brought him to his feet.

"I'm a man," he answered with spirit. "Are you guying me--in this
exigency? I'm near dead."

"He says he's a man, sir," called the man.

"All right. Send him aft."

Felton was pushed, rather than led, to the man amidships.

"How do you do?" he said kindly. "So, you thought you'd visit us. We
catch all our fish this way."

"My God, captain," answered Felton, "I'm not visiting! I jumped out of
an airship, and was sucked into your tube. I'm glad I'm alive."

And then--was the liquor affecting his brain?--the captain's face,
line for line, feature for feature, was the face of the captain of the
airship, whom last he had seen sprawling above him in mid-air. Had he
beaten him down, and been picked up first? It seemed impossible.

"How--what--how--" he stammered, rubbing his eyes. "How did you get
here, captain? You jumped after me."

"I jumped after you? You are wandering. I saw you all jump, through the
periscope, but I was here."

"Then it's the closest resemblance I ever saw. You're the living image
of the airship's commander, or else it's the liquor. My head feels
queer."

"No doubt. But it's not the liquor. You've had a terrible experience.
It's a wonder the jump didn't kill you, as well as affect your mind."

Felton was not satisfied with the explanation. It was a strange and
striking resemblance, nothing more; and he was about to say as much
when a man came forward from the engine with an oil can. He was the
duplicate in face and form of the man he had pommeled, but without the
contusions. Felton blinked in amazement, then looked at the others,
whom, in the agitation of his entrance, he had not closely observed.
Man for man--nine in all--they duplicated the crew of the airship.

"My God," he stuttered. "Am I mad, or drunk?" His brain reeled, and,
as it had reeled before, in the social life of a naval officer, he
ascribed it to the liquor.

"You've drugged me," he yelled insanely. "Every man here is a double of
another."

"Steady--steady, now," said the captain, stepping down and laying a
hand on Felton's shoulder. "You're not drugged. You're a little off
your balance, and the drink was too heavy. Every drunken man sees
double. Isn't that so?"

This seemed logical, and Felton stammered assent. He sat down on the
projecting bilge of a torpedo, trying to recover his mental balance.
It was hard work, but finally he adjusted himself to the captain's
point of view. It was a terrible jump--three hundred feet. He had
escaped death by a miracle. Men had gone insane under less pressure,
and he had taken two drinks of a powerful stimulant. He would be all
right, in time--after a little sleep. Thus reconciled, he took note
of his surroundings. The engine was stopped, the men forward had just
finished reloading the torpedo tube, and the captain was peering into
the periscope--the non-magnifying telescope which gives a view of the
seascape.

"Come up here," he said, "and take a look." Felton climbed to the small
platform on which the captain stood. Just before him was the eyepiece
of the periscope, and, at a sign from the captain, he peeped into it.
Pictured on the lens was the dismantled wreck of the _Argyll_, down by
the head, a helpless, sinking wreck.

"She's floating on five compartments," said the captain. "I just filled
the sixth, and I think we'll fill two at once this time. By the way,
what did you fellows butt in for? It was my fight. I hit her last
night, and blew up the forward magazine; then I lost her in the dark."

"But say," answered Felton, "which side are you on in this mix? You
blew up the turret, you say, and the airship destroyed her. But the
crew of that airship displayed mortal fear of you, and jumped overboard
at sight of you."

"Exactly. They would have gone off at a tangent if they hadn't. It's
better to die on your planet than to become a comet for all eternity."

"Like the airship. I see. But how did you do it, if I may ask?"

"I reversed his polarity, that's all. See that? Look, and listen."

The captain turned a lever, and a dynamo nearby began to revolve, while
an arc lamp suspended from above glowed, glistened, and sparkled,
as the current passed through the carbons. Soon it began a curious,
musical buzzing, and the captain shut it off.

"Merely an alternating current through an arc," he explained. "But the
electric impulses sent out by that singing arc are of a wave length and
frequency produced by no other means. They are just right to turn his
two magnetic poles into one, and--away he goes."

"I don't understand. Yes, I understand that you might reverse his
polarity, or combine it, as you say, by some wireless method. But,
which side are you on?"

"The side of the Lord."

"Look here, captain," said Felton, angrily. "That is the answer your
double gave me when I asked him the same question last night. It
means nothing. I am either a prisoner of war, or a guest entitled to
consideration. Why do you treat me like a fool?"

"Because you are a fool. You believe in the invulnerability of the
battleship. Well, there is one of the best. Look at her."

"I see. Destroyed, but not by you; by an enemy of yours. One who feared
you."

"Yes, as mediocrity fears intelligence, as the child fears the dark,
the savage the gun of the civilized soldier--humanity as a whole the
unseen, the unexpected, the invisible. The airship is potential, but
not final--she can be seen."

"And shot," said Felton, doggedly.

"Did that battleship hit your airship? You know that she could not. The
airship's limitations are contained in her visibility. She cannot be
hit by shot or shell, but she can be seen, and projected into space."

"Granted, but suppose she dropped a bomb on to your back before you saw
her?"

"She could not, except in the dark; then she would have to strike a
knife edge, and it would be an accident--one chance in millions. We are
constructed like a razor-back hog, to deflect falling bombs."

"But you cannot deflect horizontal torpedoes," said Felton, looking up
at the dome of the submarine. It looked curiously like the dome-shaped
roof of the airship. "I know well," he went on, talking as was his wont
among his fellow officers, "that if I could see your periscope tube
with a telescope, I could hit you with one of my torpedoes."

"Your torpedoes?"

"I am torpedo officer of that battleship. I was on the turret top
when you blew it up last night, and went up with it. I landed on the
airship."

"You are a member of that battleship's crew?"

"I am." Felton dropped his eyes at the menace in the captain's voice.
On the way his glance took in the curving walls of the submarine. They
had become semi-transparent, and even as he looked they vanished,
leaving a clear view of the sky and horizon with its string of fighting
ships, pursued and pursuing. He was again in the airship, and the
upright stanchions that he had first observed as anomalies in a
submarine now served their legitimate purpose of supports to the roof.

"The drink," he murmured, while his brain swam, and his soundings
disappeared in a mist. "They've drugged me."

"You belong to that battleship?" roared the captain, but Felton had
sunk to the floor, incapable of voluntary action. The captain blew a
whistle, and his crew answered. They surrounded him, with scowling
faces, and lifted him to his feet. He could stand, but some inhibitory
power prevented him from moving a muscle. Foremost among them was the
man he had trounced, and this man struck him, again and again, in the
face, and Felton essayed to strike back; but the paralysis of his
muscles prevented him. His blows fell short.

"Back to the battleship," thundered the captain. "Load him into the
tube. Expend that torpedo and make room."

Men sprang to the tube and turned levers. The captain sprang to the
periscope. "Right," he said. "I'll finish her."

How an airship could fire a torpedo was beyond Felton's benumbed
faculties at the time. He was struggling weakly, trying to strike, but
unable to, pounded on the face and body by the implacable victim of his
fists in the former fight, helplessly borne along toward the tube, now
emptied of water.

"Back to the battleship," they chorused. "In with him."

Powerless to resist he was jammed head first into the tube. He heard
the door creak into place behind him. Then he felt an impact of cold
water, and he had barely sense to forestall this by an inhalation of
air. Then, faintly as the voice of a telephone, came the voice of a man.

"The forrard door's jammed, it won't open."

"Hammer it," came the captain's voice. "Get a top-maul."

An age or two went by, while Felton lay imprisoned in the tube, holding
his breath, and immersed in water. Then, faintly as the voices, came
the sound of a heavy hammer on the walls of the tube:

"Clang-clang, clang-clang."

Felton awoke in his berth, as wet with perspiration as though still
immersed in that tube. The gun-room orderly tapped at his door.

"Eight bells, sir," he said.

"All right," he answered. "Eight bells," he murmured to himself. "I
heard the first four of them--let's see--about twelve hours ago. Twelve
hours of experience between the fourth and fifth strokes. How long does
a dream take? Darn a dream, anyhow."




                             ABSOLUTE ZERO


He was not exactly an imbecile--merely feeble-minded, unable to
remember his past, or even the events of a year gone by--an elderly
man who loafed about the studio building, a man with few wants and no
vices, who picked up a scanty living by cleaning up studios for the
artists, and occasionally posing for them. We called him Old Bill; he
did not know his last name, and was subject to fainting spells.

The artist, like myself, was a marine painter, each of us having
followed the sea when young, and in answering to the higher call that
comes at least once in every man's life, had taken to art with the
sea for a specialty. We both painted ships and shipwrecks, storms and
sailors, but the difference between us in age, experience, and ability
was so great that there was never anything but sincere friendship
between us.

I welcomed his advice and criticism, and he welcomed my society,
because, as he put it, my youth and enthusiasm revived his failing
energies. His studio adjoined mine, and when the afternoon light had
waned, I visited him to smoke, talk, and listen to his yarns, for he
had been longer at sea than I had, and he had more to tell. Also,
besides being a master of his art, he was a deep student of science,
keeping himself well informed on each new invention and discovery; and
his comments on such subjects were practical, logical, and conclusive.

As, for instance, in discussing that ninety-and-nine days' wonder,
the wreck of the _Titanic_, and the proposed measures to prevent a
repetition of such a terrible disaster, he had laughed at the futile
idea of more lifeboats.

"All the lifeboats in the world," he said, "will not avail of
themselves if they must be lowered from a boat deck seventy feet
high, with the steamer rolling in a heavy sea. They would all smash
against the side before half-way down. The _Titanic_ had a smooth sea,
remember."

"Long davits," I suggested, "to keep them well outboard."

"Long davits--long enough to answer the purpose--would foul one
another."

"Short davits, then, and travelers up and down the side."

"Impracticable, even if a steamship company would be willing to
disfigure their ships so much. In time of panic, the boats could not be
fitted into the travelers."

"But don't you think," I asked, "that more and stronger compartments
would solve the difficulty?"

"They would have to be as strong as the side of the ship," he answered,
"and the necessary angle irons and bracings would interfere with cargo
space and interior accommodations."

"Then a detachable upper deck," I said, "that would stay in place by
gravity, but float if the hull sank."

"It would break into pieces in a seaway. It would need to be an upper
section of two decks with an air space. Well, how about hatches,
stairways, and masts leading to the lower body? The two ends of the
ship, which are clear of these fixtures, would not hold all hands, and
if you do away with hatches, making this upper section water-tight,
how about the hundreds of people--engineers, firemen, and steerage
passengers--imprisoned in the hull?"

"Right," I answered. "It seems, then, that the only safety from ice is
in the Southern Lane route, and slow speed in a fog."

"Yes, unless this English scientist's invention proves practicable.
Have you read of it?"

I had not, and said so.

"He intends," he explained, "to send forth at intervals sharp notes
of inaudible sound which, acting like audible sound, will come back
from an iceberg, a ship, or a coast as an echo, and the time elapsed,
recorded by a suitable receiver, and divided by two, will give the
distance."

"Inaudible sound," I answered. "That seems anomalous."

"Hypothetical rather--not yet proven. But who knows? There are sounds
of too low and long a vibration--I do not mean the roll of a drum,
which is merely a succession of beats--that cannot be cognized by the
human ear. There are sounds too high to be heard, such sounds as the
chirp of a cricket, or tweet of a bird. Some people never hear these
sounds. Why not use these sounds, and receive their echoes by delicate
instruments?"

"Give it up," I said hopelessly.

"They call silence the negation of sound," he continued, "as they
call darkness the negation of light. There is polarity throughout the
universe. We are aware of plus and minus quantities in mathematics,
each calculable by the same methods.

"We know of the north and south poles of the magnet; we know of
positive and negative electricity; we know, by the expansion of gases,
that there is a force the opposite of gravitation, and which repels
instead of attracts. Some theorists have called this force apergy. I
believe that all these negative forces exist, but only in the presence,
or because of the existence, of their opposites. For I know that cold,
which, more than all other conditions, may seem to be a mere negation,
will answer to the laws of other radiant energy, and, like heat,
decrease in force as the square of the distance."

I looked stupidly at him, then at Old Bill, who, no more stupid than
myself under this avalanche of erudition, was puttering about, cleaning
up the studio. Not noticing my bewilderment, the old artist went on.

"But an iceberg," he said, "is too large to be cognized by the law of
inverse squares. It would need a diaphragm bigger than itself--bigger
than the largest ship, to collect its radiations of cold. Could it
be reduced to a point, however, and its cold concentrated, we could
calculate its distance and direction, at least, if not its size. You
know the nature of a searchlight, do you not?"

He looked at me now, and, trying to bring an intelligent expression to
my face, I nodded.

"An arc light in the focus of a parabolic reflector placed behind it,"
he continued. "Stand in the path of its beam and you will sensibly feel
the heat. Place a large lens--as large as the aperture--in the way, and
focus the beam on yourself, and you will feel a heat equal to that of
the arc light--about seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit--less what has
radiated into the surrounding air.

"Now, get out of that focus, and place an opaque disk on the center
of the searchlight aperture, and the beam will go forth with a dark
center, like a hollow pipe of light and heat. And this dark center will
have the temperature of the outer air, plus only what has radiated into
it from the surrounding pipe.

"But after passing through the lens both the light and the dark center
will reach the same focus, and if you can place a thermometer, without
burning yourself, near the focus of the dark core, you will notice
a great drop in the temperature. So, you see, cold, while negative
heat, is a minus quantity; but it needs the presence of heat to make it
respond to the same laws that govern heat."

He paused for a moment, then looked at me; and this time I could not
conceal the vacuous expression on my face. He smiled, then turned to
Old Bill.

"Bill," he said, "what do you think about it? Do you think all gases
will ultimately be solidified as they are now liquefied? Do you think
the absolute zero of space can be determined by any application of the
integral or the differential calculus?"

In answer to this whimsical question Bill said: "I dunno, sir. I can't
calcilate. I jess 'member I washed the windows an' swept up an' dusted.
D'ye want me in the mornin', sir?"

"No, Bill. If you're through, that'll do to-night."

"I'll want you, Bill," I interposed, as the old fellow started for the
door. "Come at nine o'clock, and wear your oldest, raggedest clothes."

"Yes, sir," answered Bill, and departed.

"It's the last figure in the picture," I added quickly, to forestall a
resumption of the harrowing lecture on matters I did not understand.
"And it will be done about noon. I'll be glad if you will come in and
look it over."

"Most certainly," said my friend. "Been a long time at it, haven't you?"

"Yes; but I didn't want to bother you until it was done. I want to be
original, if I can, and depend on my own conceptions."

"That's right. Be yourself. I'll be in at noon, and look at it."

I _had_ been a long time on that picture, in conception, composition,
and execution; and it had followed a longer time of inactivity, during
which I had done nothing in the way of work except to search my soul
for an idea. At last it had come to me, and I had made sketches, one
after the other, until, in composition, it was complete; then I had
painted it.

Still, there lacked a motive. It was a picture, but it told no story
intelligible to the eye without an explanatory title, and I had
not yet thought of a title. The scene was on the deck of a ship--a
flush-deck, polacca-masted craft, a type of rig I had seen but once
in my travels--and the viewpoint was at the break of the poop,
looking forward. The fore and mainsail were clewed up, hanging in the
buntlines, and the flying jib was down a-bag on the jib-boom end.

The craft was heeled, a gale of wind blowing, as evidenced by the gray
storm clouds and a sea washing over the bow, and scattered about the
deck were dead men, of the Chinese, Malay, or negro type; but here
consistency ended, for though these men were bareheaded and barefooted,
indicating warm weather, huge icicles hung from the fife rails and
scuttles, while the sea bordering the bow lost the translucency of
water as it reached the deck, taking on the white, glistening effect of
ice, in which some of the bodies were frozen.

Near the foremast, on the weather side, his feet and ankles hidden in
ice, stood a huge negro holding over his head at full length the figure
of a living man, his attitude indicating an intention to hurl him to
the deck. On his dark, evil face, as on the faces of the dead men, was
an expression of terror and pain.

But the face of the living man held over his head showed nothing. I had
not yet painted the face, and that was why I wanted Old Bill, to take
the pose and assume a terrified look. I had painted the others from
my imagination, taking care only to make each one different; but this
living face of a man about to be hurled to death was to be the center
of the picture--to be worked out in detail, with all the high lights. A
grotesque, Dantesque, Doresque, horrible idea for a picture, one might
well think; but its incongruity never struck me as my mind had worked
it out.

Old Bill came on time next morning, and, without looking at the
painting, climbed to a plank I had placed between two easels about
seven feet above the floor. He lay on his side, and at my direction
assumed the pose I wanted--arms and legs outstretched, with fingers
clutching at nothing. In this, he suited me; but when it came to taking
a frightened look, he failed. His wrinkled features went into all sorts
of contortions, and I painted, wiped out, and repainted, again and
again, then gave it up. The world had treated Old Bill too kindly, I
thought, and he could not comprehend fear.

When I had paid him for his time he left, and I painted in the face
from imagination alone--giving it, not the wrinkled look of age, but
youth, strength, and courage, and the terror that comes to youth and
strength and courage when menaced with sudden death. Then, the picture
finished, I sat back and smoked, while a weariness came over me that
soon merged into slumber, from which I was awakened by a knock at the
door. My cold pipe fell from my lips, and I arose to admit my neighbor,
tutor, and critic--the old artist.

"There it is," I said, as I led him to the picture. "Old Bill didn't
help much. He couldn't--"

"Great God, man!" he interrupted. "What are you doing? I thought you
wanted to be original. Have you been through my old drawings?"

"No, I have not," I answered hotly. "What do you mean?"

He did not answer at once. He looked at the picture with eyes that
almost bulged, muttering to himself: "Pango Sam, Wong Fing, Landy
Jim." Then he turned to me, and said excitedly: "Were you on board
that bark?"

I wondered if he had gone crazy, and did not answer.

"No," he said. "It happened before you were born. What manner of man
are you--to see into the past? It is not prophecy. Wait!"

He darted out of my studio and into his own, where I heard him throwing
things about, opening trunks and closets, and talking to himself. I
relighted my pipe, seated myself, and waited, wondering what had upset
him. After a time he returned, much calmer, and holding in one hand a
painting, in the other a small tintype, the faces of which he concealed
from me.

"Our finite minds," he said, as he stood above me, "consider only
what appeals to the five senses. Our subconscious minds consider the
infinite, in which there is neither time, nor space, nor distance. That
mutiny and murder has occurred, is occurring, and will occur. You have
dipped into the infinite, that is all. Look!"

He showed me the painting. It was dusty and dingy, but, with a few
minor exceptions of detail, the exact duplicate of the painting on my
easel!

"I painted this thirty years ago," he said, "and for twenty-five years
it has lain at the bottom of an old trunk. The subject was too grisly
for the market, and I did not try to sell it."

While I stared, open-eyed and open-mouthed, at his picture, and my pipe
went out from my irregular, gasping breathing, he held before me the
tintype. It was the picture of a young man clad in cheap, ready-made
garments--the "store clothes" of the farmer, or the "shore clothes" of
the sailor. And the face was the face that I had conceived for the man
held aloft by the negro in my painting!

"I was that young fellow," he said, "and this tintype was taken at the
end of that voyage."

"What does it mean?" I gasped. "Have I read your mind?"

"I do not know. It depends upon what else you know yourself. Can you
tell me what killed those men? Can you tell me what killed the nigger,
so that instead of being thrown twenty feet I merely slid down from his
grip and bumped my elbow on the ice? Ice, understand, near the equator,
in the Indian Ocean."

"I do not know," I choked. "Did this happen? When did it happen?"

"Nearly fifty years ago, when I was 'fore the mast, unable to
understand. But it was one of the influences that led me to the study
of science. Perhaps I could understand now, if I had the data. But
I cannot remember, and I have not your power of intuition. It is a
wonderful power, but as likely to harm as to help you. Have you studied
physics at all?"

"Only in the most elementary way," I answered. "And something killed
those men, you say--something you do not understand?"

"I can only surmise. Something struck them that froze them stiff,
that turned moving salt water to ice in an instant, that killed the
intelligence that directed it. It was a passenger, a young missionary
going home--a young genius of a man with a bent toward material things,
and a whole boatload of scientific paraphernalia that he was always
experimenting with. He was on the poop-deck when this occurred, but
went clean crazy when I fell to the deck. We put him in the Cape Town
hospital, but up to the last he was demented. He alone could tell what
he did to that bunch of mutineers, but he could not have lived much
longer."

"Tell me the yarn," I suggested. "Perhaps I can make a further guess at
it."

"The best way," he answered, "would be to hypnotize you and question
your subconscious mind. It is done in the hospitals to learn of
mysterious, baffling diseases, and why could not you tell how this
happened? But I never hypnotized anyone, so I'll give you the
yarn--tell you what I know, and perhaps you can get the rest."

He placed his picture, face downward, on my table, seated himself, and
lighted his pipe as a preliminary to his story. But before he could
begin there was a knock at the door, and I admitted Old Bill.

"Thought, sir," he said, "that you might want me to clean up when the
job is done."

This was usual; when a piece of work was in the making I paid no
attention to my place. Only when the last stroke was applied to a
picture did I think of housecleaning, and send for Bill.

"All right," I answered. "But not right away. Come back in an hour,
when we're through talking."

He had entered the room, and nodded at my answer, even though his eyes
were fixed upon the painting on the easel.

"But ye haven't put my face in it, arter all, sir," he said.

"No, you didn't make good, Bill," I answered. Then my attention was
taken by the expression of his face--a curious blankness which I knew
too well. My neighbor noticed, too, and said sharply:

"Brace up, Bill! Brace up, man!"

I knew the remedy from former experience, and happened to have it in a
closet. Quickly pouring a glass of liquor, I gave it to the shaking,
tottering old man, and he swallowed it at a gulp.

"Thank ye, sir," he said a moment later, when he was steadier. "Ye know
I don't drink, sir; but when I feel it comin' on, nothin' else but a
drink'll stop the spell. I'll be back in an hour, sir."

He left, and the artist remarked: "Poor old Bill. He'll go out feet
first one of these days, and that'll be the last of him. Well, I'll
tell you about that bark. I shipped in her at Hongkong, and stuck to
her at Batavia, where every other man 'fore the mast deserted. She was
not exactly a hell ship, as hell ships go; but the skipper and two
mates were American, with American ideas of discipline, and these ideas
were too strenuous for the cosmopolitan crew of Dagoes, Dutchmen, and
Sou'egians that had taken her down the China Sea.

"But the crew we took on at Batavia was worse; there was not a white
man in the crowd. There were three giants among them--one, Wong Fing,
a short-haired renegade from Ningpo, where he was wanted for cutting
his brother's throat. Another was Pango Sam, a West Coast negro, and
a capital seaman, but with a frightful temper. The third was Landy
Jim, and I never knew his nationality. He was a half-breed, or a
fourth-breed; when things went well with him he was yellow, but when
angered he turned black, and his eyes turned red as his hair, which,
though kinky, was the color of a brand-new brick. They were a fine
trio, and the master spirits.

"The rest were the usual riffraff of the Orient, yellow and brown,
barely able to speak English or understand orders, but able to get
out of their own way, steer after a fashion, and pull a rope if put
in their hands. With this crowd we went to sea, bound for Cape Town,
and at the last moment our passenger, of whom I have spoken, joined us
with his apparatus. There was nothing that I understood at the time,
nor even now. He had a lot of tanks, flasks, carboys, spiral pipes,
and such things, with a big, cup-shaped affair that might have been
a reflector if it had not been so long. I remember it was polished
inside, and perhaps now, could I see that outfit, I might make a guess
as to what he was experimenting with.

"No, in painting that picture you did not read my mind, or you would
have put the Reverend Mr. Mayhew in with the apparatus on the poop;
for I saw it plainly, though unable to understand; and there is plenty
of room in the foreground--on the poop. You have pictured Pango Sam
correctly, and the fellow down on deck near the fore-rigging is Landy
Jim, and Wong Fing is that fellow on the fore-hatch. It is wonderful,
and it is more than mere mind reading, though I cannot say that you
have got the features of the others. I cannot remember."

At this moment there was an interruption. The elevator boy appeared,
announcing that a visitor had arrived, asking for my neighbor, and,
with apologies and promises to return, he left me, leaving the door
open. I sat there in my easy-chair thinking of the wonderful powers of
the subconscious mind, as indicated in my own case, and wondering if I
could go farther, and solve the mystery that was beyond the powers of
my experienced and erudite old friend. I smoked and pondered, until my
pipe went out, then filled and relighted it to smoke and ponder still
more, while I looked at the picture I had painted. And as I looked the
pipe went cold in my grasp, the fixed expression on the faces of Pango
Sam, Wong Fing, and Landy Jim took on mobility of action, while the men
on deck writhed in their dying agony.

My pipe fell to the floor again, and I roused up, realizing only that
I had been half asleep, but also feeling the desire to fill in the
hiatus--to place in the vacant foreground the scientific apparatus
vaguely described by my friend. So, after a few preliminary outlinings
in charcoal, I went at it, and soon I had placed the tanks and spiral
pipes and the long, cup-shaped object described to me.

Vaguely, as I worked, I felt that I was merely obeying
suggestion--following up the hints given me by my neighbor; yet, when
I had finished, and seated myself for another smoke, I felt myself
trembling from head to foot, as though I had actually lived the
experience, and were suffering from the memories. From this state of
mind I was aroused by the return of my neighbor.

"By George!" he said, as he looked at the painting. "Where do you get
this? You have got it right, and refreshened my memory. Fifty years is
a long time, and I had forgotten; but there is the whole apparatus,
lacking only the Reverend Mr. Mayhew. Why didn't you put him in, behind
that big, long cup?"

"Don't know," I answered. "Didn't think of him."

"Well, never mind. There is a reason for all things. No doubt you will
yet get it all, if you delve farther into the infinite."

But I did not need to delve still farther, as will be apparent by what
follows.

"There is not much to the yarn," he continued. "The trouble began in
the usual way, from the white man's fixed idea that it is always safe
to kick a nigger, and that a nigger is anything human, but not white. A
good deal depends, of course, upon the kind of nigger that is kicked,
and big Pango Sam was not accustomed to it. Neither were Wong Fing nor
Landy Jim, but they all got it before we were well through the Straits
of Sunda. All three threatened the second mate, who was doing the
kicking, with sudden death, and the result was that we were all called
aft and compelled, under the muzzle of three pistols, to hand in our
sheath knives.

"I needed no such coercion, for, though I was a 'foremast hand, I had
no great sympathy for, nor community of interest with, my shipmates.
However, the skipper and two mates classed me in with the rest, and had
as little sympathy for me. In fact, the only companionship I enjoyed on
that passage was when I was at the wheel, and the passenger would talk
with me. He was about my age, and seemed to have taken a liking to me;
yet there was little that we could talk about. I was uneducated and
crude, while his was the brightest mind I had come into contact with.

"Even then I could appreciate that he knew more of navigation than did
the skipper, and I heard him say one day that the mistake of his life
was in taking to the ministry instead of devoting himself to science.
For preaching came hard to him, he said, while the study of science was
a delight.

"Well, I hardly know how the trouble started. It was partly due to our
losing our knives, for a sailor without a knife is like a mechanic
without tools. It put us all in a bad humor; we had to untie with our
fingers rackings, whippings, and stops which ordinarily we would have
cut. And one day, when the passenger had his apparatus on the poop,
a fierce squall hit us, and soon developed into a gale that demanded
the taking in of canvas. There was no time to lift those heavy tanks
and flasks down below, so, while we hauled on downhauls, clewlines,
and buntlines, the passenger remained by his property, watching and
guarding it.

"We had trouble at once from the lack of our knives, for the coils of
all halyards had been stopped up clear of the deck, and we had to untie
these while the three bullies of the after-guard yelled at us. Seas
began boarding us, too, and that made matters worse. But finally we
got the two royals, the gafftopsail, and the flying jib down, and the
courses clewed up; but while the latter was being done, I and two of
the small fry went aloft to furl, my job being the fore royal. I furled
it, and had started down, when I looked below, and saw the whole crowd
on deck fighting the two mates, with the helmsman running forward to
join the row, leaving the skipper at the wheel.

"I slid down by the royal backstay, for while I had no great
fellow-feeling for the officers, still, they were my countrymen, and
I had no desire to take part in mutiny. Before I reached the deck,
however, the fight was over, as far the mates were concerned. They were
running aft, for their guns, I suppose, while all but Pango Sam lay
stretched out on the deck, and he met me at the rail with murder in his
eyes, knowing instinctively, I suppose, that I was not on his side.

"As I jumped to the deck and reached for a belaying pin, he grabbed
me. I was utterly helpless in the grasp of that giant. He roared
inarticulately, and frothed at the mouth as he lifted me at full length
over his head, to dash me to the deck.

"But, as I told you, I merely slid down, to paralyze my crazy bone on
hard ice--ice, remember, in the tropics. When I picked myself up Pango
Sam was still standing, but dead and stiff, his feet frozen in the ice
that covered the deck. Then I saw our passenger flat on his back. He
never recovered his reason. His last intelligent speech was given as he
fell to the deck, which was about a second or so after I fell myself.
While at the wheel, a few days later, I heard the skipper quote it to
the mate. It was: 'God have mercy upon my soul!' After that he uttered
nothing but gibberish."

Behind us the sound of footsteps came to our ears: but before we could
turn, or arise, a voice, fervent and agonized, repeated: "God have
mercy upon my soul!" And Old Bill launched headlong between us, and
lay unconscious on the floor at the foot of the easel.

"Another spell," said my neighbor. "It was coming to him, I guess. Help
me lift him to your couch."

We laid the old fellow on the couch, where he lay with every indication
of a fainting spell. But, though we worked over him for a time, he did
not come out of it. He did not seem to be in a natural sleep, either,
for his breath was too faint, his pulse too irregular. We watched him
with growing disquiet for a while, then telephoned to the nearest
hospital. Old Bill was taken away, still unconscious, and all we could
do was to put him from our minds with the mental reservation that we
would visit him.

We did not visit him. Work, engagements, the eternal scramble for money
incidental to the life of every man who works for himself, prevented
my neighbor and me from getting together for the visit. In a month,
however, Old Bill visited us as we sat, discussing my picture; but we
hardly recognized him, and, on his part, he did not recognize us at all.

His old face, though still wrinkled and withered, bore an alert,
intelligent look far removed from the dull, stupid expression we had
known; he was clad in well-fitting garments late from the tailor. He
carried a cane, and on his hands were gloves which, as he removed them,
showed fingers thick and stubby, but with the unmistakable signs of
recent manicuring.

"Pardon me, gentlemen," he said, as he looked us over, "but I have
been directed to this studio by an ambulance surgeon as the place from
which I was taken in a comatose condition about a month ago. I wakened
a few days later with the memories, the consciousness--the ego, I might
say--of a young man of twenty-five. Had not that ego been in a good,
stable condition I might have gone mad when I saw my old face in a
mirror, and realized that I had lost fifty years of my life.

"Since then, however, I have been re-establishing my old connections,
and I am now trying to learn what I have been, where I have been,
and who I have been. Can you tell me anything? I am, or was once, a
Methodist clergyman, named Franklin Mayhew; but I fear that I have
forfeited the title of reverend."

"What?" exclaimed my neighbor. We had both risen to our feet, to stare
at the metamorphosed Old Bill, but now we sat down, rather weak in the
legs. I had the grace to motion our visitor to a chair.

"If you are the Reverend Franklin Mayhew," continued my neighbor, "did
you once take passage in the bark _Rangoon_ at Batavia, bound to Cape
Town?"

"I did, and by my chronology it was but a month ago. The terrible
scenes on board that vessel were the first things that came to my mind
when I wakened in the hospital. Do you know anything about it? I want
to know what happened to me."

"I do not know what happened to you, nor what happened to that crowd of
mutineers. I was 'fore the mast in that bark, and remember you; but I
have known you lately merely as a man-of-all-work around this building.
I owe you a dollar for cleaning up my place"--our visitor raised his
hand deprecatingly--"and we called you Bill. You couldn't remember
your last name, nor very far back. You went crazy aboard that bark,
Mr. Mayhew, and we put you ashore, still crazy, at Cape Town. I know
nothing more."

"Nor does anyone else?" The look on his face was piteous.

"I doubt that you can gather up the threads. Why should you wish to?
You must have lived a life of misery and hard labor. You were shocked
into fainting by the sight of a picture, right here in this studio, and
you have awakened to intelligence and mental activity."

"What picture?"

For answer I arose and wheeled the easel around so that the painting
faced him. The effect upon him was more startling than had been the
same experience upon my friend.

"Oh, God, help me!" he almost screamed. "God have mercy upon my soul!
Why must it be perpetuated? Have I not suffered enough?" He covered his
face with his hands, and with some misgiving I covered the picture with
a cloth.

"That was it," he continued. "That was the last I remember on board
that bark, and the first in the hospital the other day. I killed seven
human beings--I, an ordained minister of the gospel!"

"Steady, sir," answered my neighbor, rising and laying a reassuring
hand upon his shoulder. "You killed only six--how, I don't know--six
bloodthirsty cutthroats who would have killed you if they'd had their
way."

"But one was innocent," answered Mr. Mayhew, uncovering his moist eyes.
"The young fellow in the clutch of the big negro."

"That was myself, and I am very much alive. In fact, Mr. Mayhew, you
saved my life. You killed the nigger, but I simply fell down to the
deck. Then I came aft and helped carry you below. Look here?" He lifted
the cloth, and pointed to the face of the man held poised over the
negro's head. "That's me. Never mind who painted this picture, but look
here." He displayed the tintype. "Taken at the end of that voyage,"
he continued, "and still in my possession. No doubt, Mr. Mayhew, your
mind gave way under the shock of the experience, and it returned to
you when you looked at the reproduction. Now, don't worry about it any
more. You did right to quell that mutiny."

"Perhaps--according to most standards. But I was a minister, and my
conscience was already active enough from my devotion to science to the
neglect of my clerical work. But perhaps you are right. I'll try and
not worry."

I joined in with what encouragement I could offer, and when he had
calmed somewhat my neighbor said: "You must tell me how you did it,
Mr. Mayhew. You killed six worthless heathen, and saved the lives of
several white men, by some application of intense cold. I am a student
of science, but I cannot understand."

"Very simple," answered our guest. "You know that cold is merely
negative heat, and, if reduced to a point, will act like heat,
decreasing in strength as the square of the distance."

The old artist chuckled. "I knew it," he said. "Go on."

"And do you notice that the reflector in the picture has the elliptical
curve, instead of the parabolic of the usual reflectors?"

I gasped. In painting that object into the picture I had not thought of
curves. In fact, knew nothing of conic sections at the time.

"The secondary focus of that reflector," went on Mr. Mayhew, "was about
sixty feet away. I had designed it for experimenting with light. In
fact, I had invented the searchlight, now in general use, as I have
learned by reading up lately. But I have also learned more--that in the
fifty years of my darkness the scientific world has not caught up to
me. At that time I had not only liquefied the six refractory gases of
Clerk Maxwell, but had solidified hydrogen and discovered in advance a
gas which I had not named, but which I now find is called helium. I
had also succeeded in liquefying this gas."

"And in the focus of that reflector?" inquired the old artist, half
rising from his chair.

"Was a small cup of liquefied helium, on which floated a lump of
solid hydrogen. It produced a temperature of nearly two hundred and
seventy-three minus centigrade--the absolute zero of space."

"And it froze the blood in their veins," commented the artist,
reseating himself. "Lucky for me you didn't switch it a little higher."

I shivered, and after a few moments of silence I asked:

"If I did not read your mind, but delved into the infinite, as you say,
why didn't I get this too?"

"Didn't have time, my boy. But you may have read the mind of Mr.
Mayhew, the subconscious mind of Old Bill--the mind that never sleeps
and never forgets, you know, and which retained through the years all
that Mr. Mayhew had put into it; for you drew into the reflector the
elliptical curve, which Mr. Mayhew conceived, but which never in my
life have I considered in conjunction with reflectors."

"But you?" I asked again. "Your picture?"

"I painted from memory, and, if you will remember, left out the
reflector. But Mr. Mayhew had also dipped into the infinite, and
discovered what no living brain knew. Mr. Mayhew"--he turned to the
still shaky old man--"you have lost, it is true, fifty years of your
life. But your remaining years will be full of honor, profit, and ease,
for the whole scientific world will rise to do you homage. You are
still in advance, for you have not only isolated and liquefied helium,
the last of the refractory gases, but you will ultimately solidify it."




                            OVER THE BORDER


First, let me introduce myself. I am now an old man, healthy of body
and mind--else I could not tell this story--but in late middle life was
somewhat feeble-minded. I was an installment collector for a furniture
house.

My earnings were small--just sufficient to afford me a hall room in
a boarding house, where, with my few books, I maintained my interest
in life. I began it as a sailor in deep-water ships, but, because of
the small promise of advancement, quit the sea after ten years, and
worked on shore. I was ambitious, studious, and fairly well educated.
I worked at one thing and another, finally becoming a reader for a
magazine; and, later, editor-in-chief. But the strain upon my mind of
reading, classifying, and rejecting or accepting for publication the
various and multitudinous manuscripts sent to me, wore down my mental
powers until there came an utter collapse, and I spent the next few
years in sanitariums, with all memory of my past blotted out, except
a few salient points, such as the name of my first ship, my first job
on shore, my first incursion into literary work, and the final furious
quarrel with my employer, when I was discharged as incompetent. Then
came my slow recovery to the point where I could obtain and hold my
position as collector. So much, in prelude, for myself and history.

Yet there is one more point of my early life that I remembered, but
only because my memory of it was refreshed occasionally as I fought my
way along in my shore life after leaving the sea--Jack Sullivan, a
watchmate on that first ship, who later became a boarding-house runner
and afterward a successful boarding and shipping master.

Jack's path in life did not coincide with mine, yet we met often during
my struggle for advancement, and each time it was a drink together, and
a reminiscent talk about that voyage; and it continued during the years
when I was an incompetent neurasthenic, and he a prosperous man with
influence at Tammany Hall.

It was after such a meeting with Jack, in which he had paid the bill
and clapped me on the back, bidding me to brace up and look ahead, that
I wandered into a small playhouse, the bills of which advertised a
mesmeric exhibition.

I had never seen such a public performance before, and was extremely
interested, as the operator, a tall, bearded man, in evening clothes,
called up members of the audience and, after a few passes over their
heads and down before them, put them into hypnotic or mesmeric sleep;
and then made them perform absurd and ridiculous feats.

I left the theatre, fully impressed, struck with awe at the power of
one man over others, and boarded a street car on my way home.

Still wondering, and afflicted with an uneasy struggle of my mind with
the idea that I had known of such things before, I was forced to listen
to a desultory conversation between two men who sat near me.

They were well-dressed and well-spoken--educated men--and as the
talk went on I easily deduced that they were physicians, slightly
acquainted--one, a visiting physician of a hospital; the other, a
general practitioner.

"A remarkable case," the former was saying, as I began to listen. "He
has been there longer than any other patient, and there has been
neither improvement nor decline. A complete case of aphasia in some
regards, amnesia in others; for we once succeeded in partly hypnotizing
him and getting incoherent comments--in the choicest of English,
however."

"Is he sane, as regards the present--of passing events?" asked the
general practitioner.

"Sane as you or I, except in the relapses. He has illusions and
hallucinations, but recovers himself without treatment other than
seclusion. It is a case of second personality, no doubt; but there is
no prognosis."

"And you cannot classify it?"

"No, except as double personality. He cannot remember his name before
the time the police brought him to us. He began all over again, and is
now an intelligent man, who reads the papers, and talks sanely."

"Keep up that hypnotic treatment."

"What's the use? We are busy over more modern and vital cases. He is
merely a medical and physical curiosity."

"Keep it up. By hypnotic treatment you can obtain his past and restore
his memory. You know that. Isn't it worth while--to restore a man's
soul to him?"

"Well, perhaps I will; but I am very busy, and he is a hard subject to
hypnotize."

The car was approaching my corner. With my mind in a whirl that I could
not understand, I arose, and, facing the two doctors, I asked them
where this man was confined. "Bellevue," answered the narrator of the
story.

I thanked him, and went out, standing for a while on the corner,
breathing deeply of the fresh air, and trying to analyze my state
of mind. Something within me was beating against my poor, tired
brain--something that would not take form and expression; something
of truth and fact and experience of my own that I could not
remember--something pertaining to my life at sea.

At last I went home and sank into a troubled slumber, from which I
wakened in the morning, not with any projects for the welfare of the
man in the hospital, but for my own good. Hypnotic operations would
restore memory; so the doctor had affirmed. My mind went at once to the
successful hypnotist that I had seen at the theater, and, after a day
of idleness and musing, I called there before the performance began.

I met him, explained my loss of memory, and he promised to do what he
could, appointing a meeting at his apartment at twelve, when the day's
work was ended, and his mind and mine were tranquil.

I was there on time. While well-dressed and well spoken, there was a
slight burr to his voice and a roughness of the skin on the back of
his neck that--I do not know why--betokens the outdoor, manual worker.
He spoke gently to me, asked my name and occupation, and, when I told
him that I was a collector, remarked that he had once been a collector
himself. First seating me in an easy-chair, he faced me in another, and
took my hands in his.

"Now, I am going to mesmerize you," he said, "instead of merely
hypnotizing. I am going to put you to sleep by personal or, as some
say, animal magnetism. It is more efficient in a case of long duration,
but I never use it on the stage, because it is not necessary, and
because only I could waken the subjects. Something might happen, you
see--a fire, or an injury to myself. But here we are quiet and safe.
Now, look me steadily in the eyes, and when you have gone to sleep I
will command you, firmly, to remember all your past. That will be all.
Very simple."

I obeyed him, looking steadily into his kindly, brown eyes. As I looked
they seemed to grow larger, while the pressure of his hands on mine
relaxed. Larger and larger grew his eyes, until I seemed to see nothing
else; then a tingling sensation crept through my frame--a delicious
tremor that soothed me into drooping my eyelids.

"Close your eyes now," he said, and his voice was far away. "You are
going to sleep, and, when I waken you, you will remember all that you
have forgotten."

I obeyed him, and for a moment or two thought I had slept; but the
closing words of his command seemed to arouse me. He was still before
me, but in the act of rising. He went into another room, and came out,
dressed in rough clothing and smoking a short clay pipe; then the wall
containing this door grew blank and white, and in a moment had taken
on the exact form of the forward side of a ship's forecastle, while a
duplicate door appeared in it.

Sitting quietly there, I watched the strange transformation scene, able
to rise if I wanted to, but not wanting to, nor feeling the slightest
uneasiness about the phenomena. The pictures left the wall, and faded
into nothingness; the mantel to my right hand elongated and took on the
form of a ship's rail; then with a rush all else in the room changed.

The floor rose suddenly, and became a fore-hatch, while the place was
filled with sailors, known to me by face and name; but among them I
could not now see the transformed mesmerist--the only man smoking was
Bill Andrus, a young fellow from Australia. To complete the picture,
my easy-chair changed into the weather windlass barrel, and a dash of
salt spray came over the bow. Being able to move, I left my seat and
got out of the way of the water. All seemed natural to me; I was at sea
again, and on one of the boats stowed on the house I spelled the name
of my first ship.

Of course, it was a dream, even though real to me at the time; and
there was no beginning to it. I dropped into that chapter of my life
with a full memory of the chapters preceding it, and I went on with it
as I had lived it before, with no thought that my seat on the windlass
had, a few moments before, been an easy morris chair.

The men around me were my shipmates, and in no sense out of proportion
of place or time. It was the last dog-watch, and when eight bells
struck I went aft to my trick at the wheel with no self-questioning.
And so, I will tell the rest of this story as though I had never
forgotten it.

The name of the ship was _Chariot_, and she was small, well found and
manned, with an easy skipper and mates. We were bound to Sydney, and
before the trades had been reached each man was on good terms, not only
with the others of the crew, but with the cook and steward, skipper
and mates. There had not been a blow or a harsh word from the officers
since we lifted the anchor in the Horseshoe.

In my watch, besides myself, were Jack Sullivan, an intelligent young
Irish-American; Swansen, a big, good-natured Swede--a Sou'wegian,
we called him--Wilkinson and Tompkins, two Jerseyites; Andrus, the
Australian, the youngest and least efficient of the ship's company, but
the most intelligent; and Devlin, an Irish, hot-headed graduate of the
Dublin university, who had gone to sea from sheer rebellion against
the conventionalities of shore life. We were a congenial, cheerful lot
of good fellows, ready for work or play or fight--only there was no
occasion for the latter.

We had our afternoon watch and first dog-watch below, a rare condition
in American ships, and on Sundays a liberal dinner of duff and good
wholesome beef sweetened to the flavor of corned beef by an overnight
soaking in fresh water. Each Sunday, while the trades lasted, all
hands remained on deck in both forenoon and afternoon watches, to
wash clothes, overhaul and air dunnage, to shave or be shaved and to
mutually cut hair, all of us confident of a good night's sleep, even
on deck; for braces are rarely touched at night while the trades are
blowing.

But on a Sunday morning, just after the trades had blown out, the
young Irish ne'er-do-well wanted a haircut and a shave. Wilkinson
and Tompkins had proved the best barbers, and had done all the work
heretofore; but this time they rebelled; they were tired of it, and,
besides, a squall was coming. Devlin vociferated and declaimed, saying
that he had looked like a dog long enough, and finally, to appease
him, young Andrus volunteered the task; so Devlin sat down on the
fore-hatch, and Andrus went to work, with mock pitying comments on his
doglike face.

"Of course, you're a dog," he would say, "the Skye terrier breed; but
I'll make a fox terrier out of you 'fore I'm done. Keep quiet. I can't
cut your hair while you're wriggling like a cat in a bathtub. You're
not a cat; you're a dog."

Devlin finally ceased his profane comment and wriggling, sitting quiet
until the clipping was done; then Andrus, after a walk to the rail and
a look at the growing squall to the westward, came back, saying that
there was time for a shave--which Devlin needed as badly as a haircut.

"Quiet, you dog!" he said jokingly. "You're a Skye terrier now, and
I'll soon make you a fox terrier--just as soon as I get that fur off
your face."

He shaved him clumsily but quickly, then stood back.

"Now, Devlin," he said, still carrying on the good-natured raillery,
"you're as handsome a dog as I ever saw. Let's hear you bark."

To our astonishment, Devlin emitted a series of canine sounds, and
ended with a menacing growl. He still sat quietly on the hatch,
however, without a sign or a smile on his face to indicate that he
fell in with the joke. Then came a shout from the mate, calling us to
halyards, clewlines, and buntlines, to shorten down for the squall.

We answered, and it was not until the squall had passed and sail made
again that we noticed that Devlin still sat on the hatch, occasionally
giving voice to barks and growls. We spoke to him, but received only
growls.

The skipper and mates came forward, and commanded him; he answered by
louder barks and deeper growls. We continued for an hour, and at last
he became violent. He was put into his berth, voted crazy from some
cause inherent in his nature, and ministered unto by all hands.

He grew quiet in a few days, but never regained his senses. We would
talk to him, coax him to answer, and even sing the old forecastle songs
to him; but all we received in answer were barks and growls, and soon
we perceived that he had forgotten the use of his pan, pannikin, and
spoon. We sorrowfully taught him to eat.

And we mourned also for another good fellow, from the time of that
squall that followed the barbering. Andrus, the Australian, had been
lost overboard. At a time when royals and topgallant sails were
flapping and fluttering, the ship laid over by the squall until the
lee rail was buried, and, with wind abeam, making twelve knots, Andrus
had floundered down into the water in the waist to rescue the ship's
cat, old Tom, that had been caught unawares and was in danger of
floating overboard.

No one knew just how it happened. We only knew that the ship righted
for a moment, then sagged back to a farther angle, and, when next she
righted, Andrus and the cat were gone.

We let the canvas flap and carry away, while we strove to back the main
yards, and the skipper threw over life-buoys and gratings. But in that
furious wind we could not gain an inch on the main-brace, and by the
time we realized this Andrus and the cat, life-buoys, and gratings must
have been a mile astern. There was a ship on the horizon, following in
our wake, but it was past all reason that Andrus, who we knew could not
swim, should reach a life-buoy or grating and be picked up.

We taught and trained Devlin as we would train a dog, and he learned
readily. He first learned to pull a rope with us, and soon understood
the meaning of "belay." He learned to sweep and scrub decks, and, after
a few trips aloft with us, learned to furl, to reef, and to "loose" a
sail. He remembered every word spoken to him, and would repeat them at
the right time; but we had rounded the Cape before he could converse,
and then in short, jerky sentences; yet he learned to speak much more
rapidly than could a child.

We called him Devlin until we understood that he could not remember
it as his name; then we addressed him as "Say." Little by little he
learned the ropes, the compass, and the use of marlinespikes and deck
gear, and, though still stupid, was in a fair way to become an able
seaman again, but for an unfortunate speech of one of our number--I
think it was Swansen--who, at our forecastle supper, jokingly called
him a dog.

Devlin immediately became a dog, snapping, snarling, barking, and
growling, with all his tutelage gone from him.

We mobbed Swansen, but it did not help the case; Devlin remained an
imbecile until we reached port, where he went to a hospital.

So, with our spirits clouded, we were glad to quit that good ship
at Sydney, and separate, each going his own way. Mine led to other
voyages until, as I have said, I quit the sea to work on shore; then,
on through my struggles for a livelihood to the time of my mental
breakdown; and I even remembered and lived the experience of the night
at the theater and my visit to the hypnotist. And then I awoke, to find
him standing over me, making passes upward and over my head.

"Well," he said, as I glanced confusedly around the room, "how do you
feel?"

"Feel?" I answered. "Why, professor, I've dreamed of my whole
life--only, it is fading away. Let me think. The ship--Swansen--the
squall--no, it is going. I cannot remember. I cannot."

"Go home," he said kindly, "and sleep all you can. Each morning will
bring back fresh recollections, and in time your memory will be
thoroughly restored."

He was right. Next morning I recalled the incidents of my boyhood and
my early seafaring experience, culminating in my signing able seaman in
the _Chariot_. And as I viewed my face in the glass, I marveled at the
change; I knew it as my face, and remembered it, but now remembered the
face of my youth, which gave no promise of the worn and wasted features
in the glass.

Yet the following morning brought back more recollections of that
voyage, and the next and the next still more, until at the end of a
week I could review my past, perhaps with a keener memory than that of
the ordinary man who has tired his brain and memory without the relief
that had come to me. I called down blessings upon the head of that
hypnotist, and in my gladness of heart thought of the poor devil in
Bellevue Hospital, and went to see him.

But I was not admitted. I was not acquainted with him, and had no
plausible excuse for wishing to see him. So I went to Sullivan, my old
shipmate, and explained the case, at the same time telling him of my
wonderful cure, and my wish to secure to him the services of the kindly
man who had served me.

"Won't let you in?" he cried. "I'll see about that. Just come along wi'
me up to Tammany Hall, an' I'll see if a fri'nd o' Jack Sullivan is to
be barred out of any public institution in this burg."

We started, and as our way led past the apartment of the professor, I
suggested that we stop and endeavor to take him along, as, if all went
well, the thing could be done in a few moments.

Luckily we found him at home, packing up for the road. His engagement
was ended, and he would leave town that evening; but, when I had
explained about the poor fellow at Bellevue, whose case was worse than
my own, his kindly brown eyes lit up with a fellow sympathy, and he
came with us.

We took a cab, and Jack and I occupied the forward seat, while the
professor sat opposite. As we rode along, I noticed that he furtively
glanced into Jack's seamy face, and occasionally, and as furtively,
into mine, while a doubtful, thoughtful expression stole over his own.
But he uttered no word during that ride, and indeed there was hardly a
chance, for Jack kept the atmosphere sulphurous with his comments on
the insolence of the doctors at Bellevue.

At Tammany Hall Jack went in, and what he said or did in there I do
not know; but he soon came out, waving a pass to the hospital, and
still swearing.

We soon reached Bellevue, and were readily admitted and led to the ward
containing the hopelessly insane. And here we were at a loss as to
which of the fifty or more patients was our man. The one nurse there
did not know the pathology of a single case in the ward; but he went to
inquire, and brought back the visiting physician whom I had met in the
car. He recognized me, heard my story, was introduced to Jack and the
professor, and said to the latter:

"If you have restored this man's memory, sir, you may succeed with our
man. I am perfectly willing you should try. We have always failed. I
suppose you want a quiet room. Come with me, and I will send for the
man."

He led us into a small, vacant bedroom, containing, beside the bed, a
washstand and one chair. The doctor called for more chairs, and then
said:

"It is best perhaps that you should know something about him before he
arrives, as he is intelligent and sensitive in his present personality.
Besides his utter loss of memory, he carries the strangest antipathy to
cats and dogs--"

And here, as though in confirmation of the description, a huge cat
bounded into the room, followed by a frenzied-eyed man, who uttered
incoherent snarls and growls, as he endeavored to catch the cat.

"That's the man," said the doctor. "Look out."

Following the maniac was the nurse, who endeavored to stop the chase;
but he could not hold the violent patient, though the cat had a
moment's reprieve. It glared at its enemy from a corner; then, as the
pursuer bounded toward it, the cat sprang to my head and shoulders,
spitting and snarling defiance, and from my head, which was rather
bald, it leaped to the head of the doctor--which was balder--thence to
the floor, and out of the room. The patient pursued, but was stopped
and held by the doctor and nurse.

"Sit down in that chair," said the doctor, "and behave yourself."

The frenzy left the man's eyes, and he quietly obeyed.

"I have told you often enough," said the doctor to the nurse, "to keep
that cat out of this ward." He wiped the blood from his bare scalp.
"Why are not my instructions carried out?"

"It was not my fault, sir," answered the nurse. "I do not know who let
the cat in."

"Never let it happen again. Bring those chairs in."

"Wait, doctor," said the professor. "Can you send in a bench about a
foot high, or, if not, a bucket or pail. I want to seat this man on
something hard."

There was no such bench, he was informed, but a large pail came in with
the chairs.

I had been studying the patient. He was a middle-sized, middle-aged
man, with a careworn face and gray hair and beard, and he sat
tremblingly in his chair, and looked pleadingly at the doctor.

"I could not help it, doctor," he said. "I hate them--they madden me."

"Never mind, Monson," answered the doctor kindly; "but we're going to
try again to take it out of you. You must sit still and be hypnotized."

"What! More of that foolishness! It never did any good."

"Not hypnotized this time--mesmerized. This gentleman thinks he can put
you to sleep. If he succeeds, you will remember your past. Isn't it
worth trying? Come, now; be sensible."

He looked at the professor doubtingly, and I also looked at him,
noticing perhaps what the doctor did not--that he was trembling from
head to foot, and that the muscles of his mouth twitched; but he
pulled himself together and approached the patient.

"Yes, my poor fellow," he said, in his kindly voice, "it can be done.
I have never failed. You will remember your former name and all your
early life."

"I have studied this thing a little," answered Monson, "and I
understand that it is done by suggestion to the subconscious mind."

"You are right. And as you seem to be a well-informed, intelligent man,
it will be all the easier. Come over here, and sit down on the upturned
pail."

He changed his seat, and the professor, warning us to perfect silence,
made a few passes over the man's head and down before him.

"Sit up, now," he commanded, "and don't fall over." Monson stiffened
straight, and the professor continued his passes until Monson's eyes
took on a fixed expression. Then the mesmerist began twitching and
pulling his patient's hair, sometimes gently, and again roughly. Then
he took a chair, seated himself before Monson, as he had done in my
case, and, taking his hands in his own, commanded him to stare at his
eyes.

Monson obeyed, and, in a few moments, his eyelids drooped. Soon he
was asleep. But the professor continued the passes and the occasional
twitching of the hair for fully five minutes; then he stood up and
stepped back. The sweat was running down his face, and he wiped it off
with his handkerchief.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I have him in the somnambulistic stage, but it
may be necessary to send him deeper. I will try. Monson, answer me," he
commanded in a sharp voice.

"Yes, sir," answered the sleeping man.

"Do you hate cats?"

"Yes, sir, I do."

The professor made more passes, waited a few minutes; then made more,
and again asked sternly: "Monson, do you hate cats?"

There was no answer.

The professor looked at us with a smile. "I think I have found him," he
said. He again began the hair twitching, and after a few moments again
questioned him. And the question brought Sullivan and me, gasping and
choking, to our feet.

"Devlin," he said, in a joking tone, "am I cutting your hair to your
satisfaction?"

"You are not," answered the sleeper. "I was doggy enough before, but
ye're making a hairless Mexican poodle o' me 'stead of a fox terrier."

"Devlin," shouted the professor, as he drew away his hands, "you are
not a dog. You never have been a dog, and you never will be a dog.
You are a man, and your name is not Monson. It never was Monson, and
it never will be Monson. When you waken you will remember every event
of your past life up to and after the time of the squall aboard the
_Chariot_. You will remember everything. Wake up, Devlin, wake up, and
don't count your trouble against me, old shipmate. I did not know my
power then. I nearly drowned before that ship astern picked me up. Wake
up, Devlin. Wake up."

The professor was making furious passes upward.

Slowly the man's eyes opened, and, with the daze of sleep still in
them, he looked at the professor.

"You're a bum barber, Andrus," he said. "I wouldn't give ye hell room."

The professor did not catch his train that evening. Four old shipmates
dined together; and the dinner lasted until it became a supper, and
finally a breakfast.




                          THE FIRE WORSHIPER


At the proper age and condition he developed the usual habit of forming
mental pictures while looking into a grate fire, and enjoyed the usual
introspective calm and comfort therein; but in him, the primordial
inheritance also found expression at an age so early that it might
have formed a part of his infant reproduction of the Stone Age. From
the time he could crawl he loved the fire with the fixed, passionate
devotion of the cat, and, like the cat, he would lie contentedly for
hours on the rug before the hearth, or, to the scandal of the cook,
remove the kitchen stove lids and scorch his face over the glowing
coals.

He seemed to possess a salamander-like immunity from its effects;
again and again he was burned, but never to the point of fear, utterly
disproving the theory that burned children dread the fire. He loved
fire, and played with it, setting the carpet of his play-room in flames
at the age of three. At five he had made a bonfire of his toys, at
seven burned the barn down, and at ten was a past master in the art of
building camp fires in the woods--fires without smoke, fires of green
wood, wet wood, and rotten wood; fires of great heat and little flame,
and fires that went out without constant attention.

In playing Indian he was a valuable comrade, and though we did not meet
until the mutations of schoolboy life brought us together in the same
class--his early history coming to me later--I found this proficiency
the one asset in George Morton's character. He was a high-strung,
nervous lad, morbid and erratic at times, cowardly except in reference
to fire, and a bully when he dared be. He even lacked the school-boy's
sense of honor, which permits stealing anything eatable, and lying for
any purpose except self-defense.

Our first meeting was momentous, determining and fixing our mutual
attitude, and our nearly common interest in a third person, who was
to strongly influence us both. I was crossing a vacant lot which was
part of his wealthy father's property when I found him tormenting a
small girl of four. He had rigged her doll to the tail of his kite,
and was laughing gleefully at her anguish as the inanimate pet soared
aloft. I claim no chivalric impulses at the time; I was bad boy of the
village--a title I had earned by my health, strength, and willingness
to fight--and here was a chance for a fight.

A short conflict ended in victory for me and a new emotion born of
the child's happy smile as the doll was restored to her arms. It was
solely paternal and protective in its nature, and had I not taken note
of the wonderful beauty of the tot it would have remained so; but the
pure little face stamped itself on my mind as an earthly picture of
the super-human, and, though it made no sexual appeal, it protected me
for years against the love affairs of boyhood and youth. She became my
goddess, and has remained so.

But I was brought to earth by the impact of a stone on my head, and the
whimpering voice of my late victim coming from a distance.

"That's my sister," he said, "and you leave her alone and mind your own
business."

My pursuit of him was fruitless, for his legs were longer than mine;
but it seemed to have aroused in him the same protective regard for his
sister as had animated me, for from that time on he never teased her,
and often left the boys to lead her away from possible annoyance from
them--and from probable contact with me. There was danger from the
latter, for on many occasions I "played hooky" to loll away the day in
the bushes, satisfied with one glimpse of the child playing near the
door. And I always returned to school bettered by the experience; for I
studied harder, realizing my seafaring father's ambition that I should
have an education, and responding to his advice that if I "_must_ be a
sailor, to be the right kind--a naval officer." He, with his blood, his
example, and his talk, had impressed upon me his love of the sea, but
instead of crawling in the hawsepipes as he had done I compromised by
winning, in a competitive examination, an appointment to Annapolis, at
the age of sixteen.

My closest competitor was George Morton, from whom I received
half-friendly hints that he would get even, and my warmest admirer
his young sister, now about ten, to whom I, in my new capacity of
prospective hero, had officially been introduced. She thought I was
going to war, and earnestly asked me to be careful and not be killed.

Morton spent two years more at school before going to college, and
in this time made good his threat to get even. He was a popular hero
many times over before I had become sure that I could hold my own
in study, and he acquired this distinction by timely use of his one
talent. In the exclusive, restricted community of wealthy families
there was little of the material from which firemen are drawn, and as
a consequence a volunteer fire company had been formed, with palatial
quarters, gorgeous uniforms, and an up-to-date equipment. Fires were so
scarce, however, that its activity had found vent in parades, dinners,
and balls, until George Morton joined it. Then, as though in response
to the presence of its lover and master, fires broke out here and
there in the manor, all of which he attended, and most of which were
extinguished by his efforts or advice. He intuitively knew the thing
to do--just where to play the stream, just when to pull down a wall.
In six months he was made foreman, and in this time had saved much
property and a few lives.

But his notable feats were performed later, and these were told me by
his sister Grace, when I had finished my second year, and George was
ready for college. My parents had died since my appointment, but I took
my vacations at home, just to meet and be near her.

"He is brave as a lion," she said, with twelve-year-old enthusiasm.
"Why, when Mr. Mills' big house burned down he went up a ladder to the
third story, which hadn't caught fire yet, and went all through the
building until he had found and brought out three servants who were
unconscious from the smoke. Then he even went back for the dog, and
saved him."

"That was good work," I responded, rather vacantly.

"And then," she went on, "when the big, new schoolhouse caught fire he
happened to be right there to notice it from the outside, and after
getting all the children out safely he entered the building at the head
of his fire company and extinguished the fire. He went right into the
blazing basement with a fire extinguisher and put it out himself. None
of the rest wanted to go in, either."

I grunted my approval. I had never liked him, but evidently had
misjudged him. The child continued:

"But the bravest thing he did was when the seminary caught fire at
night. He was asleep when the alarm sounded and he rushed to the
fire half clothed. The whole lower story was afire, and above were
the dormitories with over a hundred girls fast asleep; but he went
up, right through the flames coming from the windows, and wakened
everybody. Then he pulled up ladders with a rope, and helped the girls
down. He was the last to come out, and just in time, for the walls fell
in a moment later."

"You have a fine brother," I responded, joining the girl in her
enthusiasm, and willing to do him justice. "I never thought he had
courage at all, but he certainly has proved it."

"Oh, he has," she rejoined. And then, with sisterly single-mindedness,
she gave me this: "He isn't afraid of you any more, and says he is
going to thrash you."

"Me--why?" I asked in amazement. "What for?"

"Oh, papa says the same, too. They say that a man of your age ought to
be thrashed for talking to a girl of twelve. But I don't see why. I
like to talk to _you_."

The disparity in our ages had not influenced me when younger, and as it
was growing less each day that we lived I had not given it a thought.
But this new attitude of her father and brother compelled me to, and in
helpless anger and chagrin--for I was either the same bad boy of the
village, or, still worse, a man playing the boy--I forswore her society
and went back to my third term at the academy, resolved not to seek her
again until she was of age. And with me on the train, as it pulled out
of town, was George Morton, bound for college, but we did not speak.

I manfully held to my resolution until I had finished my course at
the academy and my two years of sea service. Then I graduated, a
commissioned officer of the United States Navy, and with this backing,
and the heart hunger strong upon me, I returned to my old home,
bound to see my boyhood divinity at any cost. But I did not see her;
instead, I saw her brother at the door, and the stormy scene that
followed assured me that conventional social relations with her were
impossible. So, convinced that he had nursed the old antagonism through
the years, I fumed and sulked while waiting for sea orders, and even
half-heartedly planned unconventional relations--I sought to meet
her outside her home. But before I had met with any success, orders
came from Washington, sending me, not to a seagoing ship, but into
retirement until possible war should make my services of value to my
country.

With my career ended in the navy, and without friends, money, or
influence, I did the next best thing in the way of a livelihood. I
went to sea in the merchant service, beginning as third mate, and
learned real seafaring, which is good for sulks and heartaches. In
three years I was first mate, with the confidence of my skipper and
owners, and the prospect of a command; which attainment, and my assured
education and social position as a graduate of Annapolis, might give
me hope and courage to again approach my goddess. But, gradually
and imperceptibly--unknown to myself because there was none to tell
me--the little niceties and refinements of speech, manner, and dress
acquired at the academy, and which make a naval officer eligible to any
society in the world, had worn away from me under the harder work and
rougher associations of the merchant service; so that, when paid off at
Philadelphia in my twenty-sixth year, I was as hardy a specimen of the
typical "Yankee mate" as could be found on the water front. I shaved
for comfort, not appearance, and wore my clothes for utility rather
than beauty.

Thus arrayed and conditioned I killed time while waiting for word to
join my ship, and one day ran over to Asbury Park, finding the huge
resort half deserted, as it was in October; but there was enough of
life there to suit me, the air was clean and salt as that at sea, and I
decided to remain a few days.

I remained too long for my peace of mind and immediate welfare. The
quiet and solitude brought back the old morbid melancholy, and in this
mood I wandered about the beach and through the streets lined with
deserted cottages, fighting with myself and reviling the fates that
had made sport of my life and ideals. In this mood I was ripe for any
adventure, and spying, late at night, a figure slinking by me in the
darkness, that reminded me of George Morton, I softly followed, keeping
him in sight, but not letting him see me. He entered a dark, two-story
house in a row of other dark cottages, and I mechanically walked on,
halting before the house, with a hazy idea that perhaps it _was_ George
Morton, and that his family lived there. No light appeared from within,
however, and I slowly retraced my steps, pausing at the next street
lamp to fire up my pipe.

While puffing at the half-lit tobacco a dark figure darted from across
the street and joined me in the lamplight. It was a girl, all but her
face hidden by a hooded cloak, and this face was so white, drawn,
and terror-haunted, that I could barely recognize in it some little
resemblance to that of the child I had loved. Then she spoke, and
before my brain had grasped the fact that Grace Morton must have grown
up, I knew her voice. And the next moment, without leave or ceremony, I
had her in my arms, and kissed the frightened face until she struggled
free.

"Oh, Jack," she said brokenly, "and it is really you, after all! I saw
you to-day from the parlor of the hotel, but I could not be sure--you
have changed so much. Where have you been all these years? I have
needed you so much, _so much_, and I could trust no one but you. You
must help me to-night, Jack."

"Of course," I answered. "What is it?"

"My brother--you know him. Did you know?--no, you couldn't. Jack, he
has gone into the house there--the house we have lived in all summer;
and I think, I almost know, he is setting fire to it. You followed him.
I saw you. Did you notice a bundle?"

"Setting fire!" I exclaimed in amazement. "Why, I thought--"

"Yes," she interrupted. "We all thought him a fire hater, because
he did not fear it. But he loves it. He set fire to every house and
building that he later helped put out; Mr. Mills' house--remember--and
the school, and the seminary. He joined the church since then, and
confessed to father and me. But father is dead now, and I am alone with
him. Come, you must stop him. Stop him by force, before it is too late.
Come! I am afraid of him alone. He is insane--at these times."

She seized my hand and hurried me back, puzzled and astounded at this
new revelation of human nature.

"He carried a bundle under his arm," she whispered as we reached the
door. "It is very likely a can of kerosene, purchased in Philadelphia,
where he went this morning. I was to go to New York, but I suspected
him and came back."

She opened the door with a key and we softly passed in. At once I
detected a faint odor of kerosene, but there was no light, no sound.
Grace led me through the lower rooms, but there was no sign of fire,
smoke, or firebug. We opened the cellar door and peered down into the
blackness, and the cool, odorless air told us that he was not there
with his oil.

"Upstairs," she whispered.

"Why not sing out?" I asked, in her ear. "It'll stop him."

"Don't you see?" she answered. "I want to catch him in the act, to
shock him, overwhelm him--and cure him."

I acquiesced, and we climbed the stairs, making no noise and sensing
more strongly as we went the rank smell of kerosene. She led me into
the front room, the door of which stood open. All was dark, and there
was no significant odor.

"This is his room," she whispered. "He must be in mine, in the rear."

We passed into the hall and peeped into this room. From a lighted house
on the next street a faint illumination showed up every corner in it;
and there in the middle, stooping low over his work, was George Morton,
laying a trail of oil from the nozzle of a can, back and forth across
the carpet. This done, he made a neat pile of newspapers against the
wall, emptied the can upon it, and applied a match. A nudge from the
girl started me and I walked in upon him. He uttered one snarling yell
as he glared into my face, then sprang upon me.

I was a strong, healthy man, large of frame, heavy, and well-trained in
most forms of personal combat; but I soon realized that I was fighting
a maniac. He writhed, twisted, and bent himself, forcing me again and
again to change or renew my hold upon him. Even though I held him at
arm's length, I could not retain my grip without help from the other
hand, and then I would likely feel one or both of his feet on my chest.
It was like wrestling with a panther. I shook him, and, flail-like,
whirled him around me, but I could not conquer him without hurting
him, and this I did not wish to do. As the fight resolved itself into
a struggle of endurance, I heard a few broken words from Grace, barely
distinguishable above the noise of the scuffle, and a later glance
around told me that she was gone.

And still I fought on, endeavoring to master the firebug without
hurting him--just why, I have never been able to explain to myself.
Possibly, I dimly felt at the time that his sister would not like it,
for I spared him the weight of my fist and the throttling clutch that
would have ended the fight in a moment, even though his own hands had
torn my coat to shreds, and my face was scorched and smeared with
kerosene in one of my whirling lunges toward his bonfire. He, too, must
have felt the heat, for his snarling utterances took on a note of pain,
and for a few moments he struggled in my grasp more furiously than
ever; then he paused, became limp in my hands, and seemed to sink down.
It was a clever ruse, for no sooner had I relaxed my hold than he broke
away and shot out of the room, down the stairs, and into the street.
I let him go, but looked around; the room was in flames on two sides,
while several trails of burning oil traversed the floor.

I believe that some men in my position would have followed him; but I
know that any fireman, policeman, soldier, or sailor would have done
exactly as I did--remain to put out the fire. I dragged the blankets
from the bed, whipped the flames from the walls and windows as I
could, and when they were burned beyond use threw the fragments on to
the still burning bonfire to smother it. As I labored I heard shouts
of "Fire!" in the streets, and welcomed the news that assistance was
coming. Then I heard the clatter and clang of the engines and voices
and footsteps on the stairs. I whipped away at the flames, and just
as I laid the last damaged blanket on the now smouldering fire, a
policeman burst into the room and seized me.

"Caught wi' the goods, hev! Stand still," he said. "Stand still, or
I'll fan you."

I ceased my momentary struggle with him as firemen came in with hose
and an extinguisher, and stopped myself in a half-uttered sentence of
explanation. This was a matter of family honor that need not be made
public.

"It's a job all right, isn't it, Bill?" asked the officer of a fireman
who was calmly playing a small stream from the extinguisher on the
remaining flames.

"Surest job I ever saw," answered the man, turning for a look at me in
the darkening light. "Pretty tough-looking customer. Don't belong to
this town. Smell the kerosene?"

"I smell it all right. You can smell it a mile, and he's got it on his
clothes, too. Come on wi' me, my jewel. You're good for a few years at
Trenton."

Under a fictitious name I spent the night in jail, and in the morning,
before the time for court to open, received a visit from Mr. George
Morton.

"Want to get at the person higher up, Mr. Morton?" asked the jailer, as
they appeared before my cell. "Well, I can give you about half an hour."

"Yes, yes," answered my visitor. "I want to talk with him privately;
so, leave us alone, if you will. But don't get beyond call, please--not
too far away."

"Right. I'll come if I hear from you."

He admitted Morton and locked him in with me, then left us alone.
Morton was clean and well-dressed, with only a nervousness of speech
and movement to indicate that a few hours before he had fought for
liberty and honor with the man he was now facing. He took a seat at the
end of my plank, while I sat at the other end, and took his measure;
thinner and older, of course, than when I had known him at school, but
with the same graceful figure, and handsome, though unpleasant, face.

"Well," I said, with what sarcasm I could command. "Are you here to get
me to tell who hired me to set fire to your house?"

"Not exactly," he answered, eying me closely. "I'm here to find out
what you mean to do."

"I'm waiting on you," I said sharply. "I've kept quiet on your sister's
account, but I expect you to clear up this matter, in any way you can."

"How? By pleading guilty myself? I am also interested in my sister, and
I do not think she would like it."

I looked at him.

"It lies between you and me," he went on. "The evidence at present is
all against you, while there is nothing against me, and nothing in my
record to indicate that I would set fire to the house I had lived in,
but did not own."

"But if your record was known," I growled, "there would be indications
bearing upon this."

"I see. You have listened to my sister. Do you think she would come
into court and swear away the liberty of her brother?"

A chill passed through me at this, but I answered doggedly: "Don't
know. It depends, I suppose, upon how much she thinks of her precious
brother."

"And also," he said softly, "upon how much _you_ think of _her_.
She took you--in my behalf, of course, though that might not be
proved--into her home at midnight when I was supposed to be in
Philadelphia. Do you care to have her cross-examined upon that point,
first by the prosecuting attorney who will try you, and then by my
lawyer in case I am tried?"

"Damn your wretched heart and soul!" I yelled. "Would you shield
yourself behind your sister's good name? Would you permit it, even to
save your miserable life?"

"Not so loud, please. I answer that question in kind. Would you?"

"No!" I thundered. "A thousand times no!"

"Then plead guilty. My sister, who is a very resourceful and
self-possessed girl, turned in the fire alarm as the quickest way
to end our little difficulty, and she is in New York this morning,
believing that you and I walked out. But it was I who notified the
policeman of my discovering a firebug at work in my deserted home.
You have given a wrong name, and she will not be interested in the
little noise your trial will make--unless, I suppose, you arouse that
interest."

He got up to call the warden, and I was upon him as the words left his
lips. But I did not harm him much; I had not the time. I dropped him at
the muzzle of the warden's pistol, and cooled down at my leisure.

I did not plead guilty; I remained doggedly silent, however, and not
even the efforts of the lawyer appointed to defend me availed to
mitigate my sentence. I had been caught red-handed, had made a furious
assault upon the kindly disposed tenant of the house I had fired, and
this, indicating a deep, dark vengeance based upon some real or fancied
wrong, brought me the swift, harsh decree of Jersey justice--five years
in the Trenton penitentiary. And so not even notifying my captain, I
sank out of sight as completely as though I had signed for a voyage and
sailed.

Five years behind the bars will alter the character--yes, even the
soul--of any man living. And I do not claim that mine was changed
for the better. I began that five years with the faint hope that,
somehow, Grace Morton would learn of my plight and devise means to
free me. Then, as this hope left me with the passing of the months,
a dull, apathetic inertia took possession of me, and I worked, ate,
and slept as mechanically as an animal. Then came the meridian of my
imprisonment, when two years and a half had expired, and I could look
forward to release. With this prospect in view my mind woke to a keener
activity than it had ever known under the spur of ambition; for that
ambition was based upon a love for a girl that was now eclipsed by a
hatred for her brother. I looked forward to freedom, not that I might
win that girl, but that I might find that man--somewhere, and alone.

As for Grace Morton, the doubt often came to my mind as to whether I
ever had loved her. I had really known her only as a prattling child;
I had met her once, as a woman, and in the fervor of my sudden emotion
had embraced and kissed her. Was that love? Was her acquiescence the
sign of a mental invitation, or only the acceptance of a matter of
course? Was the sister of such a brother worth loving?

Yet these unsettled doubts invariably crystallized unto the hope that
she would so prove herself, and with this hope in mind my plans for
vengeance never embraced the killing of my enemy, only the meeting
with him, alone in some secluded place, where I could use my superior
strength and skill and thrash him within an inch of his life.

In one way my imprisonment had refined me, or rather, worn off the
rough spots acquired at sea. Good behavior had brought no commutation
of my five years' sentence, but it had brought me light tasks instead
of hard ones, and one of these was the care of the prison library,
which gave me communion with many good books.

So I emerged at last with none of the working sailor about me except
in my mind, and none of the prisoner except the cropped hair and cell
pallor. These last I got rid of in a short coasting voyage before the
mast, and then, with my chest, money, and discharges replevined from
the Philadelphia boarding master who had faithfully cared for them, I
visited my old home. Here I learned that my imprisonment was not known
and that George Morton and his sister were traveling in Europe for the
shattered health of the former. Then, with the unregenerate hope that
soon it would be given me to shatter that health still further, I went
back to my battle of life, for in love, war, or work a man must live.

Luck was with me from the start. I signed before the mast and filled a
sick second mate's place before the ship had reached the line. And at
Hongkong found my old captain, who had a first mate's berth vacant, and
was glad to get me back without asking questions. A few questions to
him, however, brought out the reason of this delicacy.

"If you young fellows knew," he remarked dryly, "all that you surely
learn later, you'd let the stuff alone. I'm part owner here, and when
you went on that drunk and quit me I had made up my mind to put you in
command. 'Tend to business, now, and you can take her out next voyage."

"I'll make good, sir," I answered, pleased with the prospect, and
willing to be thought an ex-drunkard rather than an ex-convict.

"But keep still about it," he said. "The principal owner is on board
for the trip home. Your job is to impress him before the proposition is
put up to him. He's somewhat crotchety and queer."

I joined the ship--a big, black, skysail yarder, filled to the hatches
with sugar and jute--as she was lifting her anchor. We went to sea in
a gale, and for two days and two nights I had not time to unpack my
chest, much less to take note of my surroundings and the impression
I was creating as a first mate fitted to command. I saw the owner
occasionally in the brief lulls of shortening down--a tall, spare
figure, muffled to the nose in a hooded mackintosh--but I did not meet
him until the morning of the third day out, when, after an hour or two
of sleep, I turned out for a look around before going to breakfast, and
there, in the forward companion, ran plump into him. The next moment
I had him by the throat, position, prospects, honor, love, and liberty
going down before the uprush of rage and hatred.

There flashed into my mind at that moment a memory from boyhood,
forgotten through the years, of his father being largely interested
in shipping, but it was futile, irrelevant, and left me as it came;
then, while he sagged under my grip, there came to me the picture of
Grace Morton's frightened face as she had turned it up to me in the
lamplight. But I forced it from me. That love is dead, I thought, and
I hissed the thought through my teeth with my curses. Then, thinking
of the long, bitter years in prison, the suffering and the shame, the
thwarted hopes and plans, the struggle to maintain my integrity for
the sake of a girl that had forgotten me, and knowing only that the
cause of it all was right here, in my hands, I felt what I had not felt
before--the impulse, the desire, and the self-justification to kill.

But I did not kill him. I relaxed my hold and looked into the same
frightened face that had appealed to me once before. Older now, with
lines of care and trouble in it, but more womanly and commanding. She
stood in the dining-room door, and had commanded me to stop; and I
obeyed her. Her brother slunk past her into the dining-room. The second
mate was on deck, the steward had not come aft with the breakfast. The
captain had not come through from the after cabin. None but the girl
had seen the assault.

"Go to your room, George," she called to him through the door. "Wait
for me, and say nothing to the captain."

Then she turned, and calmly regarded me. On my part, I stood before her
like a culprit, trembling, and with my tongue dry against the roof of
my mouth.

"Jack," she said, "I have watched you through this window since we
sailed, watched you in your strength and mastery of your calling. And
I have listened to your voice, that roused me from sleep on the first
night, and which I recognized as yours. And I said to myself that you
were a man, that you must be a man, and that I may have misjudged you.
But here, you assault an invalid for a quarrel over five years old,
that began in my behalf, I admit, but which ended in your own."

"An invalid," I managed to say. "A quarrel--in my behalf? Go on,
please, Miss Morton."

"In your own," she repeated. "Of course, I do not know how men feel,
and what the best may say at times about--about a woman. But could you
not let it drop, instead of resuming it here, on this ship, where I am
a passenger?"

"Please explain. You let _me_ drop, Miss Morton, when I needed you; but
I have not complained. It seems that the slightest inquiry must have
apprised you of my extremity. It seems that something might have been
done that would not compromise you."

It was her turn to be mystified. "What do you mean?" she asked. "Do you
deny me dignity, self-respect, pride, or confidence in myself? Could I
_inquire_ about a man who had taken advantage of my momentary weakness
and boasted of it? Not only boasted, but threatened to a member of my
family that he would follow up his advantage for revenge at a beating?"

"Boasted! Revenge at a beating! Grace, explain yourself. You are
accusing me of something. What is it? Boasting that I kissed you?"

"That," she said, looking defiantly into my face, while two red spots
came to her cheeks. "That, and threatening my brother, after your
defeat at his hands, with making your mastery complete."

"The damnable scoundrel!" I said explosively. "Did he tell you that
lie? Did he say that he defeated me?"

"I saw him getting the best of you," she said, with a little doubt in
her face.

"Because I did not want to hurt your brother. Did you turn in an alarm?"

"Yes."

"Before the firemen came your brother had got away from me and ran.
Then I, remaining to extinguish the fire, was arrested for causing it."

"Arrested?" Her eyes opened in wonder and alarm.

"And the best proof, Miss Morton," I said grimly, "that I am too much
of a man to boast about a woman, is that I served five years in Trenton
prison rather than call upon you to clear me."

"You did? Jack!"

Tears started to her eyes, but I went on relentlessly:

"The case was well outlined to me by your brother on the morning after
my arrest. He had sent the policeman into the house after me, and
having succeeded so far, called upon me in jail to carry it further. I
was to plead guilty so as not to attract attention to him. The evidence
was against me. I was caught adding fuel to the fire, and with my face
and clothing smeared with oil. My only chance was that the girl that
I loved would come forward. She did not, and I could not ask her. No
doubt, your brother told you that lie to kill any interest or curiosity
you may have felt concerning me."

For a moment I thought she was going to faint. She paled to the tips of
her small ears, staggered back, and leaned against the bulkhead, her
lips parted and her eyes staring at me in wonder and horror.

"Why--why," she gasped, "why did you not tell me?"

"To ask that you save me at your brother's expense?" I answered.
"To place you on the stand, where the lawyers could bait you? To
compromise you? To shield myself behind a woman's good name? No, Miss
Morton, whatever I may have become under the influence of stripes and
confinement, I was, at that time, a graduate of Annapolis--an officer
and a gentleman."

She shrank away from me and seemed about to fall. Then, having spoken
my mind, the bitterness left me, and I would have gone back to prison
could I have unsaid my words. The old love replaced the hate, and I
reached forward, just to touch her hand, if I might; but she drew it
away.

"Don't," she whispered weakly. "Don't. I didn't know; I didn't know."
She was not speaking to me, and for a moment I hesitated. Then I
forcibly turned her face to mine and looked into her eyes, swimming
with tears. "It's all right, Grace," I said huskily. "Never mind."

"I would have come," she said, in a firmer voice, "but I did not--"

I had my arms around her now, and for a moment she lay unresisting, her
face close to mine; but the next moment she struggled free.

"The girl that you loved," she said softly, accenting the last word.

"And love now," I rejoined, seizing her again. Then I flung her from me
and bolted into my room, on the port side of the passage.

The captain had appeared in the dining-room, and seven bells--breakfast
time--rang on deck. When she reached the deck I went in to my breakfast.

That evening, in the last dog-watch, Grace came to me at the
weather-mizzen rigging.

"I have questioned him, Jack, and at last he admitted it," she said.
"He is a nervous wreck, has been so for a year, and now I know why.
Your term was coming to an end and for fear of you he has dragged me
all over Europe and the Orient. He had you watched and knew by cable
that you had shipped for Hongkong, but did not imagine that you would
join this ship, which he found here on our arrival. He did not expect
you here for a month."

"We made a fast passage out," I answered. "But what about him? What is
to be done with him? Is he still a pyromaniac?"

"I do not know. It is congenital, and may break out at any time. But at
any rate, I am through with him. He has forfeited all my regard. When
we get home I shall remain there."

"And I suppose you do not want the captain informed of his weakness for
fire?"

"Not unless you think it necessary, Jack."

"I think not," I said. "He is very properly scared and subdued, and
knows that I will be watching him."

There was little further intercourse between George Morton and myself.
He appeared on deck occasionally, but usually in my watch below, and
when we met he would turn his head away, much to the chagrin of the
captain, who had no knowledge of conditions. He was pale, emaciated,
and fidgety in his manner, evidently a very sick man, and beyond
all thought of punishment; but I felt no regret at the loss of my
vengeance--I had won something better, and was content.

His attitude toward his sister, however, was one of doglike devotion
and apology, while hers was one of toleration and contempt. He would
hasten to meet her at the companion, to help her to a seat, to bring
rugs or books, satisfied if she murmured a mere word of thanks. Then he
would banish himself and look at her hungrily, waiting to be called.
There is no doubt that, up to the limits of his narrow soul, he loved
his sister; but it was a love based upon possession--the property
instinct, the love of a dog for a cached bone, a bird for its perch, a
cat for those who have housed and fed her. He had lost something, and
wanted it back; and as it was lost forever I feared for that other love
that was part of his being--his love of fire.

I could not watch him when asleep, nor depute the task to others--all
I could do was to overhaul the deck and force pumps, make up an extra
supply of draw-buckets, and examine all approaches to the inflammable
jute in the hold. In that last I found nothing to alarm me. It could
not be reached except through the hatches, which were all battened
down. And it was all in the lower hold; on top of the ballast tiers of
sugar, and above it, stowed in the 'tween deck, was the rest of the
sugar. He could not set fire to the sugar, even if he reached it.

Yet in the hot, blistering heat of the Indian Ocean, when we had lain
for days in a calm that was harder on our nerves than a hurricane,
smoke filtered up through the seams in the cabin flooring--smoke with
the pungent odor of burning jute; and the first man to notice it was
George Morton.

"Done it, by heavens!" I growled, as I turned out in answer to the
captain's quiet call.

There was a consultation in the cabin of the after-guard, to which
were called the cook and steward, carpenter and sailmaker, and the two
boatswains from the forecastles. All of these reported the smell of
smoke in the compartments of the forward house, and the boatswain said
that it was plainly noticeable at the fore and main hatches. Grace
and her brother were listening; in Grace's face were uncertainty and
apprehension, in her brother's, as he darted furtive glances at me, the
deadly fear of immediate denunciation; but whether there was guilt or
not I could not determine.

No one could guess how the fire had started, and only two points were
elucidated from the discussion, both bearing upon the captain's opinion
that nothing could be done at present but to keep the hatches on and
smother it. The carpenter ventured the opinion that the fire could not
be smothered. "For the ship is a sieve, captain," he said. "You know I
told you so in Hongkong, and wanted you to calk her, topsides, deck,
and all. There's millions of little holes to let the air in."

"And even so," added Morton, "the interstices between the barrels of
sugar hold air that can be drawn upon."

"Right," said the captain impatiently, and a little sadly. "But it's
too late to calk every seam in this ship, and if it don't smother out,
and we can't make port, this ship is gone. All we can do is wait, for
if we open hatches and jettison sugar to get at it, we'll only give it
more draft."

So, we waited, but while waiting, headed the ship toward Calcutta, if
not to save our lives, at least to meet with some craft that could
deluge our jute with water--a large steamer, with power pumps and hose.
But nothing came our way, and the days and weeks went on, with the
deadening calm still engulfing us, and the deck growing hotter each
hour. Soon the smoke became visible, curling up in countless little
spirals, where the minute holes gave it egress.

Morton faced me one day, his eyes wide open and his face twitching. "I
know what you think," he stammered. "You think I set fire to the cargo.
But I swear by all I reverence that I did not. My sister believes in
me."

"Mr. Morton," I answered, steadily as I could, for I never was my real
self in his presence, "perhaps you did not. But all that makes me
think so is my utter inability to comprehend how you could do it. A man
who will fire a seminary will fire a ship at sea."

He slunk away from me, so pitiable and wretched an object that
immediately I was sorry for my words. After that I spoke kindly to him
whenever it was necessary to speak at all.

Work went on as usual; not that, in this doomed ship, painting and
scrubbing were necessary, but to keep the crew's minds off the danger
and the formulating of futile plans and suggestions--which always
comes of idleness. But in spite of this, mutterings of discontent were
heard, and in the interests of peace, I abolished all work except the
continuous washing down of the hot deck, night and day. And at this
monotonous work men would go to sleep in their tracks, waking when they
fell over.

I had long noticed the peculiar mental effect of the jute smoke
on myself, at first a tendency to day-dreams and a lazy, sleepy
indifference to our danger; later a trancelike condition in which
voices were not heard, or if heard not noticed, and the whole inner
consciousness busy with serene contemplation of the past, the present,
and the future, mingled with visions of green trees and flowers, sounds
of tinkling water, and music that seemed not of earth.

All this brought no misgiving to my mind until I wakened, prone upon
the blistering deck one night, with no recollection of my falling. Then
I regarded it as serious, and in the morning spoke to the captain.

"Yes, we must quit," he said mournfully, "while we have our senses.
It is the soporific principle of the jute, akin to that of hasheesh,
which is made from Indian hemp. No one could sleep below without that
continuous narcotic, and such sleep is dangerous. I had trouble waking
you yesterday. Capsize the boats and provision them. The ship may
burst into flames at any moment, and when she does, she'll go quickly.
She's dry as a chip."

We numbered about thirty, all told, and to accommodate this many we had
three good boats, upside down on the forward house. These I soon had
over the side, floating light upon the smooth sea at the ends of their
painters, and we provisioned them as heavily as was safe with our added
weight. When all was ready I reported.

"And none too soon," answered the captain. "Look there!" He pointed
forward, where the tarpaulin of the main hatch had lifted like a great
bubble from the pressure of hot air and gases beneath. "There is
dunnage under the hatch and it is afire, Mr. Morton," he said, turning
to our passenger, "you and your sister will go in the boat with me. I
will bring her up when I bring my papers."

I had no mind for this. I turned away, and while directing the manning
of the boats, did some deep and desperate thinking. Put her in an open
boat with a lunatic brother and a doddering old skipper, I fumed? Not
much.

As the men swarmed down, Grace appeared in the forward companion. I
beckoned to her, and she came. We had already rigged a whip from the
fore yardarm, and in a "bosun's chair" at the end of this I quickly
hoisted her over the side and into my boat. George, leaving his sister
to the captain's care, had descended to his boat on the other side.
When all were over but the captain and myself, the former appeared on
deck.

"Where is Miss Morton?" he called. "I cannot find her."

"In the boat, captain," I truthfully yelled. "Hurry up, sir. There's no
time to lose."

I pointed, as he had done, to the main hatch. The bubble had burst,
and up from the rent rose a column of smoke.

"Go ahead, sir," he answered. "I must be last."

I clambered down the side, and joined Grace in the sternsheets.

"Where is George?" she asked. "I thought he was coming, and the
captain, too."

"Both in the starboard boat," I answered. "You're in here with me,
where I can take care of you. Shove off!" I commanded. "Both boats
shove off, and get away from here."

The second mate had charge of the other boat, and together we shot
away from the ship, putting a hundred yards between us before pausing
to wait for the captain's boat from the other side. But it did not
appear at once. Instead, we heard loud shouts, and the name "Grace" in
Morton's tremulous voice.

"Miss Morton is here," I sang out, but, if heard, I was not answered.

Then the shouts ceased, and Morton's figure appeared on the opposite
rail.

"Grace!" he called. "Grace, where are you?"

"I'm here, George," she answered. "I'm safe. Save yourself."

"Here!" I bellowed. "Here with me! Get back into your boat."

But instead he jumped down on deck, out of our sight. We pulled back
toward the ship, and waited, a fair swimming distance away. Then, as a
box of matches bursts into fame, so did that huge ship. The main-hatch
covers flew into air, tangible and visible; and as they fell, the black
pillar of smoke increased in size and solidity, while each oaken rail
became a line of fire, and even the masts, dried by the heat of weeks,
turned to fiery red columns in a few minutes.

But the top of the cabin was still immune from the flames. And up the
after steps by the side of the companion climbed Morton. He ran to
the skylight, turned around, went part way back, and then retraced his
steps, calling again for his sister.

"Jump overboard!" I shouted. "Jump, for your life!"

He did not jump. With his hands to his nostrils he shuffled forward
toward the monkey-rail that overlooked the main deck, halting at
moments, only to shuffle again. He turned around once and took a
few steps backward, then wheeled suddenly and resumed his shuffling
advance. I called again and again for him to jump, and Grace joined
me in pleading screams, while I heard the captain calling from the
other side. But to no avail; the god that he worshiped was calling the
louder. He staggered now, reached the rail, and with arms extended as
though in supplication, plunged into the inferno beneath.

Only once since then has anyone spoken of him to me. It was the gray
old skipper, who, after our rescue, wanted to set me right.

"You thought he fired the ship," he said, "for he told me of your
suspicions, and felt badly. But he did not. It was all my fault, for I
should have calked the ship at Hongkong. That three-day gale that we
met let the water down on the jute. It was spontaneous combustion."

But, in mercy to each other, Grace and I never mention his name.




                               THE BABY


It was Dartmoor who saw the chance. He was the son of a wealthy father,
and perhaps the one man of that medical class to feel equal to the
experiments given up by the old professor.

Physically, Dartmoor was exceptionally favored by nature, possessing
one of the most winning personalities I have ever met, and the face and
figure of a Greek god. And to this was added a mental development that
was almost abnormal in its completeness. I had gone through school with
him, and never saw him studying. He seemed to learn his lessons by a
few glances at the page of a book.

He had courage of a high order, but never had a fight in his life, for
he could make an adversary surrender without a fight. He could win
any girl for sweetheart, or any boy for friend. He had his enemies,
carefully chosen by himself, but when he so decided he would make these
enemies his friends. I had been one.

Shortly after our diplomas were given us, Dartmoor secured legal
possession of the freak, with a history of the case. The history was
simple; its mother, a poor immigrant, had died at its birth, and its
father was unknown.

The professor, a visiting physician of the hospital at the time, had
taken it into his sanitarium and cared for it; but beyond keeping it
alive had not helped it. It was a man that had never been conscious--a
human being born without the five senses.

Dartmoor erected a pavilion on his grounds, installed in it the freak,
together with the apparatus for massage and exercise, and gave himself
up to the study of his charge. He had me around once to witness the
experiments, but I was not enthusiastic.

The creature, who was about as old as Dartmoor and myself, lay in
a reclining posture on the exercising frame, staring vacantly with
wide-open, blue eyes. He was full grown, but with the features of an
infant--pudgy nose and pursed-up lips.

Two hinged levers worked by a crank caught his wrists as they lay
extended over his head, lifted him to a sitting position, and pulled
him forward until his fingers touched his feet. Then back he went, to
be again swung forward. When there had been enough of this, two other
levers lifted him by the ankles and brought his feet over his head,
then dropped them back.

Then there were massaging and vibrating apparatus and a portable
shower-bath to finish him off. All this had been going on since his
infancy, and now he was fairly well developed--about six feet tall,
with the muscles of an athlete.

"Dartmoor," I said, when the job was over, "this is a problem for a
college of physicians and surgeons, not for one man."

"But think of the credit," he answered enthusiastically. "Think of the
world's applause if I succeed in giving consciousness to this poor,
animated clay."

"It may be an idiot."

"Not necessarily--an infant, perhaps."

"Where do you think the trouble lies?"

"I do not know; neither does the professor. It is something that
affects the sensory, motor, and sympathetic nerves as a whole. I
shall try the different absorption treatments, and various forms of
radio-activity and ultra-violet rays. Mental suggestion may do it."

"Well, good luck to you. I've a living to make curing live people."

But I did not make a living by my profession. A girl who had said "yes"
at the beginning of my studies now said "no," and it needed no deep
investigation to discover the reason for the change. She had come under
the sway of Dartmoor's personality, and my cause was hopeless.

What made it harder was that he seemed unaware of it. He evidently
cared nothing for her, busying himself with his experiments and never
seeking her. Otherwise I might have had it out with him.

However, the girl's "no" carried with it a denial of all else that
I valued. I was young, unproven, much wrought up, and utterly
irresponsible. For the next five years my life had better be glossed
over. I went to sea, and found in the wandering life of a sailor the
only relief for the aching drag at my breast.

At last, being more sane than insane, I turned over a new leaf and
began to save money. A few years later I found myself owner and master
of a fine little schooner, and, after a few exploring and trading trips
around the South Sea Islands, came upon a pearl fishery which laid the
foundations of a fortune.

This done, I took in a ballast load of guano, and, ten years from the
time of my departure, sailed for the Golden Gate and home. I wanted to
see that girl again, married or single.

It must have been intuition, for I arrived at San Francisco just before
the date fixed for her marriage to Dartmoor. I saw him first, and it
was he who told me. He was worn out with his unsolved problem, and
about to abandon it.

There had been something lacking in his life, he said--something that
lessened his powers, but now he had found it--the love of woman. He had
awakened to the fact that he loved Miss Ewing, had always loved her,
and was rejoiced to know that she had always loved him.

They were to be married in a week. His living dead man would then take
second place in his thoughts, and perhaps new thoughts would come.

It was sad news for me, but I gritted my teeth and congratulated him.

"You're right," I said grimly. "A few years more of this business and
no woman would have you. You look hunted. Your hair is turning."

"Yes," he sighed, "I'm getting gray and old. Perhaps, as you once said,
it is too much of a task for one man. I have tried every scientific
appliance, but I have not stirred a single sense perception.

"And I am being interfered with. A local society for the prevention of
cruelty to children is getting active. I am charged with inhumanity,
and in danger of arrest at any time. Why, he could not live a week
without the care I am giving him."

"Why not let the society have him? Get him off your mind. Do you expect
your wife to be happy with that monstrosity between you? Give it up,
Dartmoor."

"I cannot. It is my life's work."

"Then you'd better take him down to my island, where I am the law and
the lawmaker. Otherwise your life will be short and your wife a young
widow."

I had made the suggestion at haphazard, but he became interested at
once, asked me all about my pearl fishery, and the gang of coolies who
obeyed me as a king, and said he would think it over. I left him then;
and believing that even as a rejected lover I had a right to see my old
sweetheart once in ten years, I called upon her.

It is hard for a man roughened as I have become to describe that girl;
so I shall not try, except to say that all sense of fair play left me,
and that I had not been in her presence five minutes before I was down
on my knees, begging to be taken back.

I almost gained my point. There were tears in her eyes, and her hand
trembled as I held it. She admitted that Dartmoor's long neglect had
lessened his value in her eyes, now that she had won him. But he had
done nothing culpable; her promise was given, and he seemed fond of
her, and in need of her.

"Confound Dartmoor and his need of you!" I growled. "I need you more.
He has his man-baby and his science. You will be second. You would be
first with me, Ella. Give him up--for me."

She shook her head slowly, and more slowly, while I held tightly to her
little hand. Then the doorbell rang, and we heard Dartmoor's voice.

"Curse him!" I cried hotly. "Ella, I won't have it. I won't give you up
to him. I'm a man now, not a bewildered boy."

He came in before she could reply. He must have seen something out of
the way in our faces, for he said jocularly:

"Talking about me, I'll wager. I wondered what made my ears burn. Do
you know," he said, "that there is a scientific basis for that old
fancy?"

As he took it scientifically and good-humoredly, I let it go; besides,
as I remembered later, my anger had left me.

"Captain," he said seriously, "I have a proposition for you--that you
take me and my phenomenon, with my attendants and apparatus, down to
your island, where, I presume, we will be undisturbed. When I am alone
with him I wish to try some experiments that I have long contemplated,
but which have been interfered with by the people of this city. I will
assume all expenses."

"Come along," I answered graciously. "I won't come within a mile of
you, and the coolies will avoid you both."

"And, Ella," he said, turning to the girl he thought he loved, "it will
necessitate a postponement of our wedding for a while. I cannot take
you down into the South Pacific on an uncertainty. You will not mind, I
know; we have waited long, and can wait a little longer. You agree with
me, do you not, captain?"

"Of course, I do," I answered with a leaping heart, but trying to
appear unconcerned. "It's no place for a woman."

She merely bowed her head and said nothing. What she thought I could
not know. Nor can I remember much of what I thought myself. Mingled
with my joy over the delay, there seemed to be vague imaginings of my
holding Dartmoor by the heels over the taffrail and dropping him into
the water. But I am not sure that these visions did not come later.

Wrong, of course; but I was an angry and jealous man.

I saw her once more before we sailed, but could not move her. She was
kind, gentle with me, and sorrowful, but obedient to the influence of
Dartmoor, with no will but his. So I gave it up for the time, trusting
not to a watery grave to break his influence but to his absence from
her.

We transferred the freak by night and lodged it in the hold, where I
had built a sort of enclosure under the cabin trunk for the apparatus.
Dartmoor brought a couple of his servants along to carry on the daily
exercising, and my Kanaka crew expressed no curiosity concerning the
strange weights they hoisted over the side at midnight. So, we got away
without trouble.

Whether or not Dartmoor exercised any mental influence over me I do
not know. I felt a healthy hatred for him as the man who had taken the
woman I loved, but I could not bring myself to quarrel with him. He
could not force me to like him, but possibly he disarmed my resentment
by his kindly feeling for me.

My island was a small affair, as islands go--merely the top of a
submerged mountain--surrounded by a barrier reef with only one passage
through it; and this entrance was known to no one but myself. Well
up from the beach I had erected huts for my coolie divers and a
comfortable house for myself on the high ground near a spring of water.

Here I purposed to install Dartmoor and the freak; but I wondered,
grimly and ungenerously, as I steered through the dangerous passage and
glanced at a dismantled hulk wrecked on the reef during my absence, as
to the chances of anybody getting off that island without my consent.

As we let go the anchor, a man pulled out in a small dingey I kept for
exploring the lagoon and climbed aboard. He was tall, elderly, and mild
of face and manner.

"Glad to see a white face again," he said as he offered me his hand.
"You are the captain, I believe--the white chief of these poor heathen.
I am Mr. Pfeffer, a seagoing missionary, and my little craft was
wrecked here last week while trying to make the passage in a storm. I
am the only one saved, and I owe my life to your divers. They have been
very kind to me, a shipwrecked wayfarer, and I would like to remain
among them a while, if it is possible for me to do so."

"Stay as long as you like, Mr. Pfeffer," I answered. "Convert us all,
if you like; but there's a critter down below that's proof, I'll
warrant."

He asked questions, and Dartmoor explained. Then the missionary
inspected the monstrosity.

"I consider my shipwreck as an act of God," he said, as he came on
deck. "You will succeed, Mr. Dartmoor, I know you will. And I will be
here, to aid you with prayer and spiritual help. For this new-born
intelligence must be trained to know and believe in the goodness of
God, who creates nothing without a purpose. It is all clear, now,
captain. I have been brought here to assist."

I did not dispute him. Fish, yams, and cocoanuts were plentiful on that
island, and I had other things to think of. An overhauling of the work
done in my absence and a trip to Honolulu for supplies would keep me
busy for some time.

As I was about to start, Dartmoor's two servants asked to be taken with
me. I consulted Dartmoor, and he sadly advised it. They did not like
the quiet life on the island and, though he had offered more pay, they
were not content. I landed them at Honolulu and saw no more of them.

Their going left the manual work of exercising the freak to Dartmoor,
and I grinned shamelessly. At this juncture I had half a mind to run
over to San Francisco and make another appeal to Ella, but gave it up.
She might not have grown away from him yet; and at any rate I could
keep Dartmoor on the island as long as I pleased. To such dark depths
of knavery does jealousy bring a man.

I ran back to the island, and no sooner was the anchor down than
Dartmoor and the dominie appeared on the beach, shouting and
gesticulating like lunatics. Then, over the noise they made, there came
from the house up the hill a sound like the braying of a burro mixed
with the wail of a fog siren. Then I heard Dartmoor.

"It's alive," he called, "and conscious. It can sit up."

"Great Scott," I said. "Then that's its baby wail."

I went ashore and received the particulars from the excited Dartmoor.

The whole life treatment had been wrong because of its mechanical
nature. He had found himself without the strength to manipulate the
machine, and had consequently resorted to hand massage. When tired he
would sit for hours, concentrating his mind upon the desire that the
freak would awaken--would see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. Then he
would resume the massage.

It worked. The creature opened its eyes one day about a week back
and moved its limbs. With the wakening of the motor nerves came a
correlative wakening of the sensory and optic nerves. He could see and
feel.

But the sensations were too much for him and, like a new-born infant,
he set up the loud, discordant wailing I had heard. A little further
treatment brought to life the sense of hearing, and after a few simple
experiments it was proved that he could taste and smell.

I went up and inspected the baby. He lay on his cot, dressed in
dungaree jumper and overalls, twiddling his toes and fingers, and
sticking out his tongue at the ceiling; but at the sight of me he set
up a roar that drove us out into the open. He could certainly "take
notice."

"His lungs are all right," I said. "He'll make a good bo'sun's mate
when he grows up. Think he'll start growing now?"

"Oh, no," said Dartmoor seriously. "He's got his growth. But we are
teaching him to walk, and we must teach him to talk. His intelligence
and memory will come with the accumulation of perceptions."

"He will talk soon," said the old missionary hopefully. "He is very
imitative. This morning he repeated 'Now I lay,' but could go no
farther. His first speech must be prayer, to give thanks for his rescue
from darkness."

"He'll learn to swear," I said unsympathetically, "if I catch him
around my pearls. Think he'll be an idiot, Dartmoor? Has he a soul
after all these years of unconsciousness?"

"He has always possessed a subconscious mind," said Dartmoor
didactically, "and now has the beginning of consciousness. But if he
has a soul, depend upon it, it is my soul. I brought him to life, and
he will feel what I feel and do what I do to the extent of his power.

"Why, that is proved now. I can quiet him by a word, or even a fixed
thought of disapproval. He smiles or laughs when I do. I was frightened
by a shark yesterday--just a momentary shock--but his wailings were
pitiable. Yet he was out of sight of me."

"Well, all this is beyond me," I said. "But now that you've got him
alive what will you do with him? Take him back to the coast and exhibit
him? He'd make a fine dime-museum star."

"Nothing so cheap. I do not care to take him back until I have fully
demonstrated my theory. But, in his development he will need more than
my care and Mr. Pfeffer's. He needs the tender ministrations of a
mother. A woman's instinct alone can tell when to punish and when to
reward.

"I want you to go back home, captain, and bring Ella to me, with her
mother. Mr. Pfeffer can marry us, and then you can take the mother
back."

"Dartmoor, you inhuman devil," I answered with what restraint I could,
"would you condemn a civilized young woman to companionship with that
brute?"

"In the interest of science, yes. My wife will work with me."

"She won't come," I answered explosively. "In justice and fairness I
shall warn her of what is ahead. She won't come, depend upon it."

"She will. I will write her a letter which you can deliver to her."

I acceded--I do not know why. I had sworn to drown him in the lagoon
before I would lend a hand toward his marrying that girl. I only came
back to myself when three days out, homeward bound.

I was obeying his orders; yet, as the days went on, I found my will
power and determination growing. If I took that girl out, I vowed she
would go as my wife.

Nothing of the sort happened. When she read his letter she insisted
upon going, and her weak old mother fell in line. In vain did I beg and
storm. Nothing I could say availed against that letter.

I could not recognize Dartmoor's right to that girl over my own,
though I was compelled to yield to his greater power. On that run out
to sea I did all I could to sway her. I prayed to her and argued with
her, representing as strongly as I could her life with a heartless,
bloodless scientist and a man-baby--a repulsive, incongruous parody on
the human race; but I finally had to give up in despair.

As we sailed into the lagoon I observed through the glass the whole
colony, Dartmoor, the missionary, and the gang of coolies mustered on
the beach. And with them was the baby. They had taught him to walk.
Clumsy and huge, he lumbered around among them, and occasionally
dropped to all-fours. Even at the distance I could hear his thundering
"Da, da da!"

"Nice prospect for Ella," I thought gloomily. "Heaven help the poor
girl!"

I lowered the quarter-boat and sent mother and daughter ashore, for I
was determined not to witness Dartmoor's meeting with the girl I loved.
Yet the jealous devils in my soul were too strong for my determination.
I looked through the glass at Dartmoor assisting Ella ashore, and swore
dismally as he took her in his arms, kissed her on the cheek, and
turned away from her to the mother.

A scream, either from Ella or her mother, interrupted the second
greeting, and I shifted my glass. There was the brute baby, with his
huge arms around Ella, attempting to follow the example of Dartmoor.
The missionary shouted, and the coolies danced around at a safe
distance.

Dartmoor acted. With a bound he had the brute by the throat and pulled
him clear. Then I saw them clench, and at this I dropped the glass and
sprang into the dingey.

I took only one look behind as I pulled furiously on the oars. They
were on the ground in a mad struggle, the brute uppermost. Ella had
fainted and her mother was bending over her, while the missionary and
the coolies were well up the hill.

As I grounded and sprang out with an oar, the brute slowly rose erect,
looking at Dartmoor.

"Get out of here!" I yelled. "Clear out!" and brandished the oar.

He stumbled away a short distance, dropped and crawled a little
farther, then lay down on the sand. I made toward Ella.

"Is she hurt?" I asked anxiously.

"Only fainted away," answered the mother. "That creature frightened her
so. He is simply terrible."

I went to Dartmoor, prone upon his back, and stooped over him.

"Hurt, Dartmoor?" I asked.

"My back," he whispered. "He has broken my back. I cannot move and
there is no sensation below the waist. Where is he now?"

"Lying down over yonder," I answered. "What can I do?"

"Nothing. Protect Ella from him."

"I will. I'll murder him if need be."

"You will not need," he went on in that weakening whisper. "I did too
well. He had only my soul to inspire his impulses, without my governing
mind. He took my love for Ella only as his mind could interpret it, as
mere impulse. He took my anger and vented it upon me. He will die with
me. It is but the passing of one soul."

Dartmoor was right. He breathed his last in a minute, and I went over
to the beast. He, too, lay quiet and still.




                       THE GRINDING OF THE MILLS


Now, be it understood at the first word that I have never believed
in astrology as an exact science, or even a working hypothesis to
explain the curious happenings of life which we ascribe to luck, fate,
Providence, the law of cause and effect, or, latterly, to mortal mind.
Nor do I offer this story with any intent to help the astrologers
in their difficult efforts to prove their science correct; for it
proves nothing beyond the scope of coincidence--unless, possibly, that
the laws, mathematical and other, beyond human soul life, are past
our present comprehension. This is merely the contribution of an
experienced old man, grown gray and tired in the effort to understand
his fellowman, and who has at last given up the problem, trusting that
it may aid some younger investigator.

My acquaintance with them began early, very early--in fact I was
present at, and assisted at, their birth, which occurred at the same
moment, their mothers lying side by side on the same narrow cot in the
crowded hospital. There had been a railroad accident, and these two
injured women had been carried to the nearby institution where I was
serving my apprenticeship in medicine. They recovered in time, went to
their separate homes unacquainted, and resumed their lives, one the
wife of a wealthy man, the other a scrubwoman. They never met again,
nor did their lives conflict; but their children, born at the same
moment, and at the same spot, lived out careers that were strangely
parallel, strangely consistent with what the astrologers teach.

In my later capacity of visiting physician to that hospital I often
met young Dunbar, the scrub-woman's boy, as he progressed through the
ailments and accidents of childhood; and as family physician to the
wealthy Lance family I as often met their pampered youngster. After a
few years I noticed that if anything was wrong with one, something--not
necessarily the same thing--happened to the other. For instance,
young Dunbar broke his arm at the time young Lance had the measles.
The latter sprained his wrist, and the former came to the free clinic
the same day with a black eye, acquired in a fight. I called this
coincidence for a while, until both mothers died at the same hour,
of the same disease. Then I recalled that I, who had been present
at that other momentous event in their widely divergent lives, was
now the useless physician to each. I began to take notes, but never
investigated the lives of the mothers; my studies and speculations were
concerned with the lives of the sons. And I first learned that since
birth they had never met.

Each in his own environment, these two boys grew up, as different in
physique, mentality, and morals as can be imagined. At sixteen their
characters were shaped, and at this age I invoiced their attributes.
Each was what the other was not. Dunbar was a tough, Lance a gentleman;
but Dunbar possessed physical courage of the highest order, while
Lance, up to this period in his life, had never voluntarily placed
himself in the way of pain or punishment. He would run from an angry
goose or girl playmate. On the other hand, he possessed moral courage,
while Dunbar was a moral coward. Lance proudly bore himself through a
storm of boyish ridicule when caught playing with dolls and toy-houses,
while Dunbar hid himself in shame because of defeat at the hands of a
larger, heavier boy. Lance was truthful, polite, and with a high sense
of honor and justice; Dunbar a liar, a bully, and a bad example. His
associates were the worst in the town, and when there came the time
that my safe was robbed, and the loot was found upon Dunbar, I could
not have saved him, even though I had believed him innocent. It was
simply a case of the People against Dunbar, and I was prosecuting
witness.

Others had robbed me, and Dunbar, unthinkingly, had held the goods
until arrested. I could not prove this at the time, and so Dunbar
was convicted. But, as an incident in this story, on the day that
he entered prison to begin a four-years' sentence, Lance, the most
effeminate boy I had known in my experience, entered the Naval Academy
at Annapolis, there to begin a four-year tutelage in a profession where
the most masculine attributes are required.

I saw him on his four vacations at home, each time more mature, more
certain of himself, more effeminate in speech and mannerisms, yet
graceful in bearing and possessed of what might be called masculine
beauty. He was tall, erect, with curly hair and a pink complexion,
untouched by the tan of sun and sea and wind; for he had not yet begun
his two years' sea cruise.

I visited Dunbar in prison as often as I saw Lance, for my own
vacations took me into his vicinity. On the first three occasions
he was sulky and resentful, but on the fourth and last was utterly
changed. He begged my forgiveness, was earnest and hopeful of the
future. He asked for books to read, and advice on his plans. I met
him more than half-way, and soon learned the cause of the change in
him--the warden's daughter. She had lent him her small store of books,
had sympathized with him as she dared or cared, and had become his
Goddess of Light and Hope. I talked with her before I left; she was a
tall, willowy sort of girl with a very sweet, spiritual face--not so
beautiful as compelling. She could exercise a strong influence on any
man of Dunbar's rugged type. Dunbar was tall, broad, and intensely
masculine. He was dark of complexion and dark of mood, for his
limitations bore heavily upon him; he knew that he must start life and
ambition handicapped by a term in prison. But the dogged, courageous
spirit of the man triumphed over this, and he had planned for a
seafaring career, in which not too much would be asked of a man's past,
and not too much would be required in the way of refinement to insure
success.

"For I know I'm a bad investment, Doc," he said, "because I didn't go
to school when I could, and I traveled with the worst playmates I could
find. But I think I can make it up. I'll have that girl ahead of me, to
reach for and work for if I get her. She understands about my kind of
men. There are a lot of us here."

I wished him good luck, and when his time had expired--he served the
full term with no commutation--I secured him a berth with a relative of
mine who commanded a ship, and he went to sea. The ship sailed on the
day that Lance's leave expired, and, on that day, Lance, too, went to
sea on his practice cruise.

Astrologers say that, given the date, place, and exact minute of a
person's birth, a calculation can be made that will prophesy the
happenings for good or evil in that person's life, and fix the dates
or the periods of time; and, conversely, if given the dates of the
happenings and departures, the exact minute and place of birth can be
determined. If this is true, it would equally apply to the case of two
persons born side by side, giving them similar experiences varying only
by the pressure of environment and the initial distance apart when
born. And Lance and Dunbar seemed to be proving it true.

Shortly after they left, the jail warden was elected sheriff, and moved
his goods and family to the county seat, the small town where we lived.
The daughter, now about seventeen, was welcomed in the best society of
the place. I saw her often; and the more I learned of her beautiful
mind, the more I deplored Dunbar's unfortunate infatuation, and felt
that a lesser girl would have answered the purpose. But now I know that
a lesser girl could not have reached him. He needed a star of the first
magnitude.

In two years Lance was back, a passed midshipman, waiting for his
commission as ensign and an assignment to a ship. Dunbar did not
appear, and I wondered if the connection was broken; but was relieved
on this point by a letter from my relative, which apprised me that
Dunbar had quit him to ship second mate with another skipper; and on
comparing dates I found that this was simultaneous with the return
of Lance, though Dunbar was in San Francisco at the time. But there
seemed to be other influences entering into the environment of Lance.
He met Miss Ella Madison, the daughter of the Sheriff. Now, while the
best society of the small town had welcomed this splendid girl, Lance,
invested with wealth and the aroma of a commission, was not affected
by the general estimate. To him she was a find, a pretty girl to flirt
with. I saw them together very often, but never arrived at a conception
of his attitude until he expounded his philosophy of life in answer to
a query of mine--a quest born of my interest in Dunbar.

"Are you to be married?" I asked.

"Married? No. I don't believe in marriage. I consider marriage, the
linking of two human beings together, to be a crime worse than the
tying of a dog and cat together by a rope and turning them adrift to
fight it out. Marriage, Doctor? Why, marriage is an institution of
human society worse than slavery--responsible for more crime, sin,
sorrow, suffering, and murder than anything that ever afflicted the
human race."

"Well," I answered, somewhat amazed, "what will you substitute for
marriage, admitting that what you say may be true?"

"Association of two who love, until each is tired of the association,
then separation."

"And do you apply such a code to your interest in Miss Madison?"

"Of course; but she's old-fashioned in her notions. Likes to be loved,
but wants to be married. She resists my philosophy."

"She's right, you young scoundrel," I said. "Get out of my office."

My anger, of course, has no place in this story, and I soon forgot
it, trusting in the girl's nobility of soul; and a letter from Dunbar,
the first he had written, roused my hopes that there might soon be
an antidote for Lance. It was a long communication, written from
Liverpool, which apprised me that he had obtained a first mate's
license and was in a fair way soon to obtain command; but the diction
and style of that letter surprised me. With all my acquirements, coming
of a university education and a daily correspondence with educated
people, I could not have edited that letter. It was a masterpiece of
English, and I answered it, giving him the news of Miss Madison that he
asked for, and advising him to appear.

But he did not appear; and four years went on--years of fruitless suit
on the part of Lance, and fruitful pursuit on the part of Dunbar, as
evidenced by his letters. Miss Madison remained invulnerable; Lance
steadily disintegrated, becoming more masculine, more dissipated, more
fixed in his reactionary philosophy of life. He resigned from the navy
two months after his return and remained in the small town, except
for occasional visits to New York. His father died, and with all the
property in his control, he bought a schooner yacht, and invited me to
a trip--which invitation I declined. Dunbar had become a first mate,
and later a captain of a small bark which, in a letter, he said would
sail from Honolulu for New York. I hoped he would come home, for in
every letter he had written was the request for news of Ella Madison,
and his assurance of a soul-born worship of her. I knew something of
feminine psychology. I felt that here was the need of a strong man;
for in my few talks with the girl I had not impressed her with Lance's
unworthiness.

Lance continued in his reversion to type. His dissipated habits
brought him into contact with men who expounded only the physical.
He had a fight, in the small town, with a bartender, and actually
thrashed the man--a feat I would not have accredited to him. Again he
stopped a runaway horse and saved from certain death the occupants
of the carriage. He bore these honors modestly, but I could not help
speculating upon the question as to whether or not he was drawing upon
his affinity, Dunbar, a sailor who risked his life daily in the earning
of his daily bread. Dunbar's increasing refinement, as evidenced by
his letters, bore out such a speculation, and it seemed that each,
without knowing the other, was benefiting by the psychic association.
But Miss Madison the link between the two, who was lifting Dunbar up
and dragging Lance down, remained normal, uninfluenced by Lance and
unremembering of Dunbar; for, in a short talk with her, I found that
she had forgotten him.

Now Sheriff Madison died, and as the girl was without friends or
relatives, I took her into my home as a member of the family, satisfied
to have such a rare and beauteous creature under my care, and glad of
my vested power to keep Lance at a distance. But it came too late; I
noticed her abstraction, then saw tears in her eyes, and, long before
my professional knowledge told me, I guessed that Lance had won.

There was a stormy scene when I met him, upbraided him, and appealed
to his manhood, and was met by flippant philosophy, ridicule, and
defiance. In that talk I caught him by the throat and only relinquished
my grip as I realized that his death would not avail. He must marry
her, I thought, and that thought saved his miserable life. He went out,
angry at me and insistent that his position was justified by human
experience.

He went on a yachting trip soon after, and before he came back I read
in the New York papers of a rescue at sea. The yacht _Sylph_, cruising,
with owner on board, had come upon the dismantled wreck of the bark
_Holyoke_, Captain John Dunbar, and rescued all hands at the moment of
sinking. A feature of the rescue was the plunging into the sea of Mr.
George Lance, owner of the yacht, and his saving the life of Captain
Dunbar, who had remained until the last, and who, hampered by his
oilskins would have drowned in the turmoil caused by the sinking hull,
but for the heroic action of Mr. Lance.

I read this to Miss Madison. She was pleased at Lance's heroism, but
expressed no interest in Captain Dunbar, the last to leave his sinking
ship.

Shortly after, Dunbar came home and his first visit was to me. With all
my predilection to think well of him I was more than surprised, and
agreeably so. I had last seen him in a cell, a convict, a jail-bird,
with the prison pallor on his face and the prison flavor in his soul.
He stood before me now a big, broad-shouldered, handsome fellow of
twenty-eight, with dark, curly hair, a dark, sunburned face, a cheery,
optimistic smile, and a voice that rang with suppressed laughter. His
diction was faultless; he had read and studied deeply. He used words
and phrases only at the command of educated men. Had I not known his
antecedents I would have pronounced him a university graduate; yet I
knew that he was John Dunbar, a self-made man, and I approved of his
handiwork. I introduced him to Miss Madison. His attitude toward her
was that of a religious devotee in the presence of an idol. Hers was
that of a woman wearied of life and life's ideals. She did not know
him--did not realize that this big, splendid man was a product of her
own creation--a failure, inspired by her beautiful face and a few kind
words toward effort, struggle, and victory. Dunbar was a success; he
had made it so, and nothing could take it from him. But she did not
know, and I could not tell her now.

In his talk with me he outlined his plans. "I'll get another ship,
soon," he said, "for the owners don't count it against me that a leaky
old tub started a butt in a Hatteras gale and went down. Besides, she
was well insured. But, meanwhile, I've accepted command of Mr. Lance's
yacht. I'll have to study up a little on yacht etiquette, and I'm all
right. Say, isn't he a fine fellow?"

I did not contradict him, though I withheld enthusiastic concurrence.

"He'd made three trips in his gig," went on Dunbar, "and handled
it finely in that tremendous sea, taking off my men as they jumped
overboard. I stayed to the last and he made a separate trip for me, but
arrived too late. She took her final plunge before I expected it, and
there I was, thirty feet under before I knew it, with long rubber boots
on and a long oilskin coat that I couldn't unbutton. But I did get to
the surface, full of water and nearly unconscious, when I felt his
clutch on my hair. Oh, he's a man--the real thing, and whatever I can
do for him while I live, I'll do, and don't you forget it, doctor. I'm
that man's friend for life."

I inwardly groaned and changed the subject.

"And what are your intentions with regard to Miss Madison?" I asked.

"To win her love, if I can, and make her my wife," he said,
determinedly. "You say she does not remember me--the fellow in jail?
Well, don't tell her, doctor. I'll tell her myself when the time comes,
but not now. It might hurt me."

I promised, but could not see the future clear of trouble, for Dunbar,
for Lance, and for Miss Madison.

Dunbar went back to New York, to assume charge of Lance's yacht, and
I spent the next few months in fruitless argument, denunciation, and
threat; but I could not move Lance, and I think I drove him to harder
drinking. Then there came the time when Ella Madison, the girl I loved
as my own child, asked me to accompany her on a trip to sea in Lance's
yacht.

"I must disappear for a time," she said, sadly, "and I want you with
me. I know I will die if you are not with me, for he is inflexible."

"I'll go, my girl," I said, grimly, "and stand by you. But, God help
the scoundrel if things come to the worst."

I thought of Dunbar as I said this, wondering what he would do, when he
learned that his goddess was the victim of his savior.

But we packed up--my wife, the poor, weakened, and helpless girl,
and myself. We went to New York, boarded the black, shiny schooner
at Twenty-sixth Street, and put to sea, Dunbar delighted at the trip
with the woman he adored, and Lance drunk and disagreeable. It was
an unpleasant experience in his life, rendered necessary by his very
slight adherence to the conventions.

The yacht was a fine schooner of about a hundred and twenty feet
length, carrying, besides her skipper, a mate and twenty men, with a
cook, steward, and cabin-boy. She was well found, in stores and the
liquid refreshments dear to the soul of Lance, and well able to keep
the sea until this unfortunate happening was over.

I have not said anything so far of my wife, and she has small part in
this story. Let it suffice that she was with me heart and soul in my
interest for and love for Ella Madison, and our only desire was to
help her as we could, I as a medical man, she as a woman full of human
sympathy. The event came at the beginning of a gale off Cape Hatteras,
when Lance was half drunk, and Dunbar excited and interested in the
work of snugging down. He was on deck, and I heard his roaring orders
to his men while I, with my wife, attended the poor girl below in her
stateroom.

I had seen in Dunbar's eyes the suspicion that he entertained, but
had not yet brought myself to the point of informing him. Yet it came
unexpectedly, when, clad in oilskins, he caught me at the companionway,
and said:

"What's the matter? Is anything wrong with Miss Madison?"

"Dunbar," I answered, "she will be delivered of a child in less than an
hour; and its father is George Lance, who saved your life. Be careful
what you do or what you say."

The man reeled as though I had struck him, then went forward, and I
heard his voice, directing his mate and men. I hoped that his strength
of soul would stand by him.

I went below, meeting Lance in the forward cabin. He was
half-intoxicated, and I had small interest in his conversation, but he
said something that I remembered.

"No need, Doctor, to preserve any evidence of this. I'll see to that
all right. Just leave it to me, and she can go on and live her life,
and I'll go on and live my life, just the same. It's all a matter of
common sense. Understand."

I did not understand--until later, when, having left Ella Madison
with a small, crying creature in her arms, I went to my berth utterly
exhausted, and was aroused by my wife, who said: "The baby is missing.
Where can it be?"

I turned out and peeped into Ella's stateroom. She was sleeping
peacefully, but there was no sign of the babe.

"I only left her a few minutes ago," said my wife, "and the little one
was beside her. It had stopped crying."

"Go to your room, dear," I said, "and leave this to me."

She obeyed me and I went on deck. The yacht was hove to, under a
close-reefed mainsail, a double-reefed foresail, and the jib, with the
bonnet off. Forward, the watch on deck walked back and forth in twos
and threes, clad in snug oilskins and unmindful of the bombardment
of spume and spindrift. The mate was amidships, looking aloft and to
windward, and aft near the wheel was Dunbar, staring moodily into the
storm. I waited until he stepped forward to speak to the mate, then
approached the man at the wheel.

"Has Mr. Lance been on deck?" I said, nonchalantly.

"Yes, sir. He came up a short time back."

"Throw anything overboard?"

"Yes, sir. He had a bundle, and dropped it over the lee quarter."

"That's all right. Keep your mouth shut until I talk with you."

I went below, shocked and horrified beyond my powers of self-analysis.
Lance had murdered the child born to the woman he had won and despised.
And here on the scene was Dunbar, who had worshiped this woman as an
abstract ideal, whose life had been saved by this murderer, and who was
under such heavy obligations of gratitude that his course of conduct
was problematical. I could not foresee the solution. I did not know
what Dunbar would do.

I sought my wife and told her. She could not advise me nor help me. I
hunted for Lance, and found him, locked in his stateroom.

"Let me in," I said. "I want to talk with you."

He opened the door, and I entered. He was ghastly pale,
wild-eyed--drunk.

"Have a drink, Doc," he stuttered. "Of course, you know that I've
queered the case--that things are all right, now, and that when we get
back she can live her life and I can live mine."

"You will live your life," I said, "as a convict, sentenced to life
imprisonment, unless a more merciful decree of the court shall send you
to the electric chair."

"Oh, have a drink. It's all right. The evidence is out of the way.
Now, I'm willing to cut her out--to have nothing more to do with her,
and she can do what she likes, get married, or remain an old maid.
I'm through. I've made good. Her reputation hasn't suffered, because
nobody knows, except you, and I, and your wife. Well, what's the use
of talking? Just keep still, and we'll go back to New York. She can go
home, and the whole thing will end."

"Don't flatter yourself," I answered grimly. "There is a man on deck
that you will have to deal with--a man who has loved this girl for
years, who knows your position, and who will know of the crime you have
committed. You are a murderer, and you will have to deal with John
Dunbar."

"What have I got to do with him? He's my skipper, to do as I tell him."

"I'll see about that."

I left him and sought Dunbar, who stood on the weather quarter, alone.
The same man was at the wheel, and I raised my hand warningly as I
caught his eye. He nodded, as though he comprehended.

"Dunbar," I said, as I reached his side, "has the captain of a ship, or
yacht, the power to put the owner of the craft in irons?"

"Yes," he answered, slowly, the words seeming to struggle through his
set teeth, "if the owner violates the law in any way, or threatens by
his acts the destruction of property or life."

"Then put George Lance in irons for the murder of his own child."

He started, and looked intently into my face.

"He threw the child overboard within half an hour of its birth."

"Then, Doctor," he answered, slowly, "it seems that he does not mean to
marry her."

"Most certainly not. I gave up that hope long ago."

"He will cast her adrift to live this thing down as she can, I suppose."

"Yes, as he says, to live her life as she likes while he lives his."

"I will not iron him, doctor; for that would mean arrest, a trial, and
publicity. Where is he now?"

"In his room, drunk and defiant."

Dunbar threw off his long oilskin coat, doffed his sou'wester, and
descended the cabin stairs; I followed, and my wife, standing in the
open doorway of Ella's room, beckoned to me.

"I have just told her," she whispered, "but she seems too dazed to
realize it."

Dunbar, who had halted in the middle of the cabin, approached.

"May I speak to her?" he asked, quietly. We assented, and he stepped
into the stateroom. The poor girl, white and wasted, looked at him as I
have seen a kitten look at a huge dog, but she made no protest.

"Miss Madison," said Dunbar, gently, "do you remember the boy in the
jail about ten years ago, to whom you were kind when others--excepting
the doctor here--were not? Do you remember John Dunbar, who served a
four-year sentence?"

She nodded, slowly and weakly, with the light of recognition stealing
over her face.

"I am that boy, Miss Madison. Your kindness made a man of me. I studied
and worked and saved, looking forward to the time when I might reach
your level and ask you to be my wife. In all these years of absence I
have not spent ten seconds of my waking life without thinking of you,
your face and figure, trying to recall your voice, your gestures, and
expression. I want that you should know this--that you should know how
I loved you and what that love has done for me, so that you will not
think that your life is a complete failure, even though your present
trouble ends things for me. I am going to die. Good-by."

He leaned over, put his arms around her neck and gently lifted her;
then he pressed his lips to hers, long and passionately, and, laying
her down, brushed past us at the door.

"Where is he?" he asked, grimly.

"In his room," I answered. "But, Dunbar, what are you thinking of?
You're not thinking of dying, are you?"

"That, and other things."

He opened the door of Lance's room.

"Mr. Lance," he said. "Come out of that."

"What do you mean by this intrusion, Captain Dunbar? This is the after
cabin, and my private room, where you have no business to be. You are
my sailing-master. Go on deck where you belong." Lance's voice was
thick, and he spoke brokenly. But this ended it; Dunbar's face, voice,
and manner sobered him.

"Come out of that room!" thundered Dunbar, "or I'll drag you out by the
hair. COME!" The last word was like a trumpet-blast, and Lance followed
him out into the cabin.

"Mr. Lance," said Dunbar, his face as white as a sailor's may become,
and his voice low, tense, and thoroughly under command, "you saved my
life, and by so doing debarred me from any action antagonistic to you
while I retained that life. But you have forfeited yours. You could
go back to New York, stand trial for the murder of a helpless infant,
and die in the chair--which death would not atone for the suffering
you would inflict upon this girl that I loved, and upon me. For she
would be flouted by the world. And so, to save her from this flouting,
and because you have got to die, I appoint myself your executioner,
out here at sea where there are no reporters to give the facts to the
world. But in killing you I give you back the life that you gave me;
for that life is nothing to me compared with the happiness of Ella
Madison. Come! Come on deck, and go overboard with me."

"What--what?" stuttered Lance, his eyes wide open in terror. "What are
you thinking of? If you love this girl, marry her. I will stand the
expense and start you in life. You can command this yacht at double
your present pay, or I will secure you an interest in and the command
of a ship. This seems a pleasant solution of this very unpleasant
business. Come, now, what do you say?"

"Damn you!" roared Dunbar, and his fist shot out. Lance was fairly
hurled by the impact on his jaw against the bulkhead, where he fell to
the floor. Before he was well on his feet Dunbar had him by the throat.

"On deck with you," he said, as Lance struggled in his grasp. "Come,
and we'll follow the baby."

"Dunbar," I shouted. "Stop this. Are you going to be a murderer, too?
Leave this to the law. The law is adequate."

"The law will publish her shame to the world," he replied, as calmly
as a man may speak while struggling with one under mortal fear of
death. For Lance had roused himself to the necessity of action. He
was, a tall, strong man, nearly the match for Dunbar. They fought and
struggled round that cabin floor, while my wife screamed and finally
fainted. But I could give her no attention; I was trying, though a man
getting on to old age, to separate these two men, one bent upon death,
the other fighting for life. Through the open stateroom door Ella must
have heard it all.

Even as I tried, with my small strength, and the words at my command,
to stop this suicide and murder, there came to me the memory of the
similarity of happenings to these two men--that they were born in the
same spot and at the same moment, that the dates of their departures
coincided, and that they had both been strongly influenced by the
same woman, one to be uplifted, the other to be dragged down. Was it
to happen that both should die at the same time? I felt, rather than
believed, that the laws of astrology were as nothing when opposed to
the human will, and I resolved to stop that struggle. I rushed on deck,
and called the mate. He came, the inquiry in his face apprising me that
he had heard the sounds from below, and was wondering.

"Call all hands," I commanded. "The captain is half insane and is bent
upon jumping overboard with the owner. Separate them."

"Not much," he said. "I've nothing to do with their troubles, but I've
got my living to make. Both have power to fire me, and no matter who
wins, I'd get it in the neck."

"Men, come aft here," I shouted to the sailors. The men forward came
toward me, but were stopped by the mate.

"Go back," he said. "This is none of your funeral nor mine. Let the
owner settle his own affairs."

They obeyed him, and drew away. Of course, they did not know. I ran
aft to the companion. Dunbar and Lance were just at the upper step.
Dunbar was speaking, quietly, softly, yet intensely upon the matter in
hand--the absolute necessity of their both dying. He had one hand on
Lance's throat, the other upon his hair, and he was dragging him bodily
out of the companion.

"Dunbar!" I shouted, "stop this. You are insane. Put him in irons and
take time to think. Then you will not want to do this. Think, Dunbar."

He did not answer. His grim, determined face did not change nor soften.
He was the master of the other and was using his power. Slowly, while
Lance struggled and shrieked for help, he dragged him over toward the
rail.

"Drop your wheel," I said to the helmsman, "and help me to stop this
murder and suicide."

"Can't leave the wheel, sir," the man answered. "Get some of the other
fellows."

The other fellows were under control of the mate, careful of his job. I
was in despair, and in my despair I threw myself upon Dunbar, demanding
that he desist. He struck me down with a blow, and while I was in a
half-comatose condition, I saw a white-clad figure emerge from the
companion, and approach the contestants. It was Ella, in her night
robe, pale and weak, but determined.

"John," she said, as she laid her hand on the shoulder of Dunbar, "John
Dunbar. Stop. If you do this I will die, too. Do you want to kill me?
Stop, or you _will_ kill me. Stop, John Dunbar, and think of me, the
woman you say you loved."

Dunbar released his hold on Lance, and while the terror-stricken
scoundrel rushed to the companion, he turned toward the girl, his face
twisting with the conflicting emotions of his brain. I staggered to my
feet, reached her side and supported her.

"John Dunbar," she continued, "you are too big, and strong, and brave,
to do this thing--to kill yourself so that you may kill another. Live,
so that I may live, too. God will care for him."

Dunbar shook like a man with the ague, and it was some time before he
could control his voice in answer.

"I _can_ live," he stammered, "for you. But, is it possible? You love
him."

"I do not. He killed my child--his child."

Dunbar stiffened up and looked around.

"Mr. Wright," he called to the first mate. "Put the owner in irons and
lock him in his room."

"Aye, aye, sir," answered the officer.

And so, with the help of four husky, able seamen, Mr. George Lance,
owner of the yacht _Sylph_, was ironed and confined by order of his
sailing-master, charged with the crime of murder.

We returned to New York. Ella, collapsing in my arms after her
declaration to Dunbar, was put to bed by my wife, and slowly recovered
her strength. Dunbar, somewhat changed by what she had said, grew
tranquil, but non-committal. My wife recovered her equanimity, and
expressed hope for the future, in which hope I joined her; but Lance,
with his wrists linked by handcuffs, and his soul tortured by deadly
fear, reviled us all whenever his opened stateroom door gave him
opportunity.

There is little more to this story. We anchored, handed Lance over to
the harbor police, and went home to await the trial. Dunbar, whose
testimony was not needed, secured command of a ship and went to sea.
Ella remained in seclusion and was not dragged into the trial when
it came off; for Lance, on the evidence furnished by the man at the
wheel, my wife and myself, was easily convicted and sentenced to life
imprisonment. But there were the usual appeals and retrials, and,
pending the final disposal of the case, and with regard to Ella's
future, I moved my goods and chattels to a far-away city, there to
build up a new practice in a community that knew nothing of the trial.

But John Dunbar followed us, and, considering the preliminary reference
to astrology that appeared in this story, it is but fitting to close
with the statement that on the day Dunbar married Ella Madison, Lance
entered the penitentiary, there to remain for the rest of his life.




                             THE EQUATION


Captain Bill Flanders walked down East Twenty-third Street toward
the Yacht Club dock, tired, mentally and physically. Back and forth
from the big steam yacht which he commanded, to ship chandler, boss
carpenter, boss painter and boss rigger, he had traveled, night and
day, for four weeks; but at last the work was done, and the yacht,
shining like a piece of cabinet work, waited at anchor off the landing
for the owner and his daughter, who, with other guests, were to make
the Mediterranean cruise.

Bill had not slept for the last two nights, nor bathed nor shaved for
the last four. He was irritable, cranky, and when he came upon a crowd
of half-grown hoodlums egging a mongrel dog on to a small black kitten
in the clutches of one, Bill gave way. He spared the dog, for the dog
was palpably not in sympathy with the project, but he mercilessly
punished the rest. First, he grabbed the kitten, and stowed the wee
creature in his pocket, then he went for the gang, and, with fists and
boots, so afflicted them that they fled, howling and swearing, from his
vicinity. He sped them with stronger profanity, and when the last rowdy
had disappeared around the corners or into saloons, Bill went his way
with the kitten purring gratefully under his big but soft hand.

Bill felt better for the experience. Bill was a bachelor, whose life's
experiences had been sadly devoid of sentiment. He was, or had been,
a "bilge midshipman," as they say in the navy--that is, a student at
Annapolis who had failed to pass the final examination, and had then
gone to sea as he could, simply for the love of the sea. He had put in
one voyage before the mast in a Yankee ship, and learned self-control;
had sailed in English ships, and learned to eat anything edible not
named in the Board of Trade allowance; had tried Norwegian, German,
Italian, Scotch, and Russian craft, and learned the fundamentals of
the Brotherhood of Man; and then, waking up, he had taken to American
yachts, and soon risen to command. He was a blond giant, smooth-shaven
and gentle of speech, except when aroused; then his face grew dark, and
his voice took on the accents of a fireman's trumpet.

It was late in the evening; he hailed the anchor watch, and the dingey
put off and took him aboard. He saw that all was well, and turned in,
first feeding the kitten and stowing it in his berth. In the morning
the little black mite was still with him, and he fed it again, then
shut it in his room while he attended to business. And it may be
mentioned here that, as the days went on, the kitten grew plump and
playful and lovable, while Big Bill Flanders' big heart grew bigger as
it infolded the pet.

But the business of that morning was the cleaning up of the yacht, and
the taking aboard of the owner and guests. They came, at ten o'clock,
and Captain Bill and the steward received them at the gangway. The
owner was the conventional wealthy man, dignified and severe, who spoke
sternly to his sailing-master, politely to his guests, and smiled
only upon his daughter, a person who invited and demanded smiles. The
abashed steward smiled, as he took her bundle of shawls from her; Big
Bill smiled, as he sent forward a thundering order for men to lift the
baggage out of the boat; and the cabin-boy smiled, as he opened the
companion door for her. She was about twenty-one, with dark hair and
eyes, and of medium height and build, beautiful, as men value beauty,
but with the additional charm of presence that we cannot name except
as personality. The friends of such people smile with them, laugh with
them, frown with them, and suffer with them, and each thinks it emotion
of his own. She had smiled upon Bill, and he went forward, smiling
himself, and happier than he had been for years--for all the years
since he had hoped for his commission, and failed to pass the test. He
spared a few moments to the kitten, fondling, stroking, and caressing
it, then tucking it snugly beneath his blanket against the time when he
would come again.

In bringing this kitten aboard, Bill was guilty of disobedience; the
owner had told him explicitly that the big yacht was to be kept clear
of cats. But as the owner had given no reason for this embargo, he had
considered it merely the whim of the moment, expressed by an irritable
old man, and forgot it quickly.

Bill conned the big steam yacht down the river, through the Narrows,
and out to sea by the Ambrose Channel; then, just a little tired, and
able to enjoy a smoke, he was about to call the mate to the bridge,
when Miss Mayhew appeared. She climbed the steps, rigged out in a
hooded mackintosh--for there was a Scotch mist in the air--and with her
was one of the guests--a tall, well-built, intellectual-looking fellow
named Pearson, a lawyer, as Bill knew by the steward's gossip, and a
devoted attendant on Miss Mayhew.

"You are the captain, aren't you?" ventured the girl. "Do you know,
Captain Flanders, that I've never met a real captain in my life, until
now, though I've read of so many? Have you ever led a cavalry charge?"

"What?" gasped Bill. "Why, Miss Mayhew! No, I'm a seafaring man, not a
soldier."

"There are several kinds of captain, Miss Mayhew," interposed the
lawyer, smiling. "There is the captain of a battleship, we'll say, or
of a cruiser, a destroyer, or the captain of a merchant ship, a North
River sloop, a mud scow, a tug, or a canal boat; then we have captains
in the army, who might lead cavalry charges and we have captains of
militia--tin soldiers, some call them--and captains of industry,
captains in the Salvation Army, captains of police, and captains of boy
soldiers in the parochial and industrial schools."

"And where, and how, do you classify me?" said Bill, his eyes opened
wide, and his voice tense and restrained.

"You?" said the lawyer. "Why, under the rules of the New York Yacht
Club, you are not a 'captain,' but a 'mister.' You are Mister Flanders,
not Captain Flanders."

"I am?" stuttered Bill, in a suppressed fury of rage. "Yes, you're
right. Under the rules of the club I am mister, while the owner is
captain, but in the minds of my crew I am called captain of this ship,
and away from soundings, under the law, I _am_ captain, with power,
backed by the law, to put a recalcitrant guest in irons if he gets too
fresh. Get off this bridge instantly, or I'll call my men; and if you
resist, I'll have you in irons."

"You will?" asked the smiling Pearson. "Well, all right; put me in
irons, and I will deprive you of your license."

"You will not!" stormed Bill. "We're off the three-mile limit, and on
the high seas. Get off this bridge, or I will confine you for mutinous
insubordination. Go, and go quickly, or I'll call the boatswain."

"Gentlemen, Captain Flanders, Mr. Pearson," interposed the girl,
anxiety and apprehension in her face. "Please do not quarrel. Why
should you?"

She looked appealingly at Bill, and his rage left him. Yet it took a
moment or two before he could speak sanely, then he said:

"Of course not. Mr. Pearson, I apologize for my share in this."

"And I apologize for mine," responded the lawyer; "but I think it best,
Miss Mayhew, that we go down now. Good afternoon, Mister Flanders."

He smiled sweetly as he spoke, and turned his back; the girl smiled,
too, but from a different motive, as Bill could readily perceive.
There was trouble in her face--embarrassment, shame, and sympathy--and
something else which Bill could not analyze.

"Don't mind," she whispered, then followed her escort down the steps.

Bill called his first mate, gave him the course, and went to his
room abaft the pilot house. Here he lit his pipe, and lay down--all
standing--in his berth; but not to sleep, only to think of the bright
face peeping out of the mackintosh hood, and the troubled smile, and
the whispered admonition. He thought, too, of the blackness of lawyers,
and dozed off profanely reviling them to be wakened by the purring and
caresses of the kitten. Bill petted the small thing, and forgot Mr.
Pearson, but remembered the troubled smile and the whispered words.

After that the girl came many times to the bridge, and always without
escort of father or admirer. There were plenty of these, and Bill
took the measure of all, as he glanced aft occasionally, and saw
them dancing attendance upon her. There was a little slim fellow,
named Arsdale, whom the steward described as an artist; a big, portly
gentleman, named Muggins, who was a famed short-story writer--and
Bill, as he looked at him, wondered why he himself could not write
short stories and be famous--and a magazine editor on his vacation,
a fine fellow, as men go, one who had especially commended himself
to Bill by his tact, his appreciation of the big fellow's inborn
qualities, and by his deprecation of his own. "I'm only an editor," he
had said, "a critic of other men's work. I'd give my job if I could do
something original, if I could write something, or do something, or
paint something, or kill something. I have tried the last, but never
succeeded; the authors I tried to kill got new life from other editors,
so--what's the use?" This man's name was Elkins, and Bill liked him,
until he saw Miss Mayhew smiling on him; then he classed him in with
the rest. A man in love is not reasonable, and this was Big Bill's
condition, as he was forced to remind himself when the gossipy steward
informed him that, to the best of his understanding, Miss Mayhew was
an adopted daughter, and in no way likely to inherit the vast wealth
of the father--stocks and bonds, steamship lines, railroads, and such
things. As a rich man's daughter, she was out of his reach, and, as an
honorable man with a full supply of self-respect, he could not make an
advance. But as a ward, a poor dependent, she was on his level, and the
big soul of the big boy rejoiced. He loved her, and he would have her.
So he told himself, joyously and courageously.

Another man among the guests worried Bill, until he learned that he
was the family doctor; he worried him by his assiduous attentions to
the girl, even against the presence of his own wife in the party, and
it was the owner himself who set the matter right. Doctor Calkins, it
transpired, had been a member of the family, practically, since the
girl was born. So, with his rivals all placed and classified, Big Boy
Bill grew tranquil. But he still kept his eye on Pearson.

And so the big yacht charged across the Atlantic, with Bill on the
bridge or in his room with the kitten, the male contingent of the
guests attending upon Miss Mayhew, and Miss Mayhew herself seemingly
indifferent to their attentions, manifesting a strong desire for Bill's
society on the bridge. She came, as often as she could, to talk with
him, to scold him for imagined masculine peccadilloes, and to smile
upon him. And Bill went under.

He knew, as all men know under such conditions, that the small, sweet
girl loved him as the little kitten loved him, just because he was
big, and strong, and protective. And while he could not, under the
circumstances, manifest his response to the girl, he took it out of
the kitten when off duty; he would grab the little thing, bring it up
to his lips, kiss it, and fondle it, and hug it--all of which brought
response from the cat in the shape of scratch marks on Bill's face; for
cats are not psychologists; they know nothing of the workings of the
male human mind.

But still the cat was fond of Bill, as manifested by purrings and
kittenish advances, and Bill was no less fond of the cat, in spite of
the scratches on his face. He gave the small creature the caresses that
he would have given the girl that he loved, had he have been allowed
to. Yet there came a moment when he was perilously near to being
allowed to.

She joined him on the bridge, when his first mate was asleep, the
guests aft in deck chairs, and the father and owner below in his room;
she had brought her fancywork--mysterious to Bill, for he saw nothing
but scissors, needles, and an expanse of white cloth, all of which he
knew nothing about.

There was a half gale of wind blowing; the awning was furled, the
weather cloths stretched along the bridge railing, and the deck chairs
of the guests placed in snug positions under the lee of the houses;
there was a lively sea rolling, which prevented any great activity of
mind or body in the guests, and no one seemed to care that the owner's
daughter came to the bridge. Bill brought her a chair from his room,
and incidentally aroused the kitten from sleep; the kitten purred, and,
receiving only one pat and stroke, followed her big master to the door
of the room. There she stood, looking out on the stormy sea, and, no
doubt, jealous of the other kittenish creature in the mackintosh, whom
Bill was seating in the chair.

The small fluffy lump of darkness saw her lord and master apparently
petting another creature, and came out on the bridge, shivering with
cold, yet animated by a purpose of protest. She crept up to the pair,
out of sight of the man at the wheel in the pilot house and sprang on
to Bill's shoulders, purring contentedly, and giving him a tentative
dig of admonition with her sharp claws. Bill reached up, to pet her and
bring her down--possibly to introduce her to the girl. But this was
not permitted. Miss Mayhew screamed, stood up, and backed away, her
eyes wide open in terror and dismay; then Bill, dimly understanding
that the cat was an interloper, took it down, and tossed it toward the
door of his room. Then the girl, uttering incoherent little cries, of
terror, flung herself into his arms and the big fellow infolded her,
kissing and comforting her, and promising protection from danger which
he did not sense or understand. The man at the wheel was busy, the
guests more or less asleep; no one saw but the slighted kitten. Bill
kissed the frightened little face again and again, and the outraged
kitten acted. With one leap she reached Miss Mayhew's shoulders, and,
spitting and purring her hatred and love, she separated the two. The
girl, gasping and choking, shrank back, struck the small creature a
blow that sent it flying three yards away, and went insane. She turned
on Bill in a fury of rage, and, while she uttered no word that could
not be printed in a modern novel, yet there was enough of invective,
threat, and menace in her attitude to make the big man back away from
her, shocked and horrified beyond conception. The girl followed him,
waving her scissors, tightly clutched in her hand, her eyes blazing,
her face distorted in furious rage, and her small body quivering with
the emotions that racked it.

"You cowardly dog!" she screamed. "You dared to play this trick on me?
If God will help me, I will kill you."

She lunged at Bill with the scissors, and he dodged. He could not speak
in protest or argument; he was too surprised and shaken. All he could
do was to run to the door of his room. She followed part way, and then
paused, her eyes still blazing, and her face distorted; yet she seemed
to be trying to control herself.

"Don't ever, while you live," she said calmly, "speak to me again, or
attempt to."

"Very well, Miss Mayhew," answered Bill gravely. "I'm sorry, but I do
not understand."

He turned into his room, as the best place for him, and noticed the
black kitten darting out. Then he heard a scream from the girl, and
turned to look. She was making for the bridge stairs, her scissors
still tightly clutched, and the wee, black cause of the trouble chasing
her. Bill caught his pet, and shut it in with him, while he smoked, and
thought, and deduced, with the logic of a poor man, on the never-solved
problem--the inscrutability of women.

In half an hour he was aroused by a shout, and went on deck. His men
were tumbling out of the forecastle; stewards, cooks, and guests were
scrambling forward, and a glance down from the head of the steps showed
Bill the cause. Miss Mayhew lay prone on the deck, the scissors still
gripped in her small hand, but the points driven into her side, and a
pool of blood drifting down to the scuppers from the wound. Bill jumped
clear of every step, and, landing beside her, picked her up. She was
unconscious, and her eyes were closed. It took an effort of strength,
but he drew the scissors out of the wound, and looked helplessly into
the face of the doctor.

"What happened?" asked the latter. "Well, never mind what happened. She
has fallen down the stairs and wounded herself with her scissors. Carry
her aft. We must stop this effusion of blood. Heavens"--he looked at
the deck--"she has bled a quart already. Aft with her quickly."

Bill carried the limp and bleeding form back to the cabin, and, having
laid it gently on the bed in her stateroom, was moved to go. He was
sailing master; the agonized father was there, the doctor, a member
of the family and acting the part; the doctor's wife, a motherly and
practical old lady, and a group of quiet, gentlemanly, and questioning
rivals, whom Bill had no love for and who invited their own destruction
by the looks they gave him. Bill went to the bridge, called his mate,
then, capturing the steward on his way forward to the galley, ordered
him to report, as he valued his life, on the condition of the sick
girl. The steward promised, and Bill waited on the bridge.

The steward went aft, and Bill watched him come up on the run and race
forward. Bill again cleared the bridge stairs at a jump, and met him.

"Dying, captain," gasped the steward. "Dying from loss of blood."

Bill went aft--he never remembered whether he walked or ran--and bolted
down the stairs, shoving aside the small Arsdale, the big Muggins, the
athletic Parsons, and even the gentlemanly Elkins, all of them white
in the face, as they hovered near the stateroom door, and burst into
the room, where the grief-stricken father, the anxious doctor, and the
weeping Mrs. Calkins hovered over the quiet, unconscious form on the
bed. The rivals followed him in, but did not attempt to get between him
and the girl. The doctor looked around at them, while Bill leaned over
and raised the girl's head in the palm of his hand. He choked, but did
not speak.

"Nothing but transfusion of blood will save her," said Doctor Calkins.
"Who will volunteer?"

"I will," stuttered young Arsdale.

"You won't do, young man," said the doctor, coldly. "You're not big
enough, and need all the blood you have for yourself."

"Then I'm the man," said Muggins, the author. "Heavens, what an
experience! What a story I can make of it!"

"You won't do, sir," repeated the doctor to this aspirant. "Your blood
is impregnated with alcohol, and Lord knows what. I would as soon
inoculate her with vitriol." Mr. Muggins left the room.

Mr. Pearson drew back, very pale in the face, evidently impressed with
the thought that he was expected to offer himself to the sacrifice; but
no one seemed to notice, and Mr. Elkins, the editor, faced the doctor.

"I have mentioned to the captain," he said, "my wish to do something,
be something, make something, before I die. I am a healthy man, Doctor
Calkins, and I offer myself."

The doctor looked him over approvingly.

"It will take a full quart of your blood. You may not survive."

"Take it," said Elkins firmly. "I will run the chance."

Bill looked up, dazed and shaking. He had dimly recognized the drift of
the talk, but now grasped the fact in its entirety that a man--another
than himself--was ready to die for this girl that he loved. It was
preposterous, unthinkable, and impossible. He laid the girl's head back
on the pillow, and motioned Mr. Elkins out of the room. Mr. Elkins went
quickly and quietly. There was that in Bill's face that induced him to
obey the gesture.

Pearson and Arsdale followed as quickly, stumbling somewhat in their
haste, and even the stern old father drew away from Bill.

"Does she need my blood?" asked Bill grimly. "I've plenty to spare.
Take it all."

"You are needed to command this boat," said the doctor.

"I am not. My two mates can navigate. Get ready quickly, or she may die
while you're talking."

Bill threw off his coat and rolled up his sleeve, showing an arm as big
as an ordinary leg. The doctor rushed for his instruments, and while
he was gone the owner asked brokenly of Bill how it happened.

"I do not know, sir," he answered, resolved not to describe the scene
to her disadvantage. "I did not see her fall. I think nobody saw her
fall."

"God grant that she lives!" said the old man, all the austerity gone
from his face. "I can do nothing, willing as I am, for I am old and
feeble; but you are young and strong. You see, there is much at stake
beside by own grief and suffering. She is my daughter, and the real
owner of this yacht, and every bond, and share, and mortgage that I
control. Should she die, I would die myself--from poverty and want,
while her relatives would obtain control. Still," and the old man
stiffened up, "why should I speak of this? She is my daughter. I love
her, for she is all I have left. Save her life, and while I live I am
at your command."

"The hell you say!" said Bill. "I thought she was your ward."

"My daughter by my second wife," said the old gentleman, with dignity.
"My first wife, with all her relations, is still alive and fighting me."

"I think," said Bill reflectively, "that I understand. Well," and here
the doctor appeared with his appurtenances, "you don't love this little
girl any more than I do, and I'll do my part."

"Lie down beside her quickly," ordered the doctor. Bill did so.

"Can you stand pain?" asked the doctor of Bill. "Or do you want an
anæsthetic?"

"Go ahead," growled Bill, between his teeth. "Work quickly."

"I am going to sever a vein in both your arms, and connect them by this
tube. Miss Mayhew is unconscious, and will feel no pain. But _you_
will."

"Go ahead," yelled Bill. "What do I care for pain? Use your surgical
skill, and save her life, or, by God, I'll toss you overboard. Quickly,
now. Go ahead, before she dies."

"I will," answered the doctor grimly, as he picked up his lancet.

Bill felt pain; he felt that his arm was being torn from his shoulder,
as the doctor severed a large vein, and dragged the upper end out from
the bleeding wound. He gritted his teeth, however, and closed his eyes
tightly, while the doctor ligatured the vein and bound its end around
the tube; then, shivering in every muscle of his body, he waited while
the same operation was performed on the arm of the girl. Then the
ligatures were removed, and Bill slowly went to sleep, the pain and
distress, love of the girl, and interest in life leaving him as the
somnolence increased.

He awakened a few years later, as he thought, lying in his own berth
abaft the pilot house, his arm bound to his side, and the black kitten
nestling upon his chest. He looked at the little creature, and an
ungovernable hatred overcame him. He could barely lift his free arm,
but with this arm and hand he brushed the kitten off to the floor. Then
he tried to pull himself together, but did not succeed; things were
obscure, he could not remember, and all he felt was hatred of the cat,
now glaring at him from under the chart table. There was a nautical
almanac in the berth, and Bill flung it at the cat; but she dodged,
and ran out on deck. Then she came back in the arms of Miss Mayhew,
or, rather, in one arm, for the right was strapped to her side, as was
his left; she was not exactly rosy of face, still there was color in
it, and a soft light in her eyes, and a sweet smile on her lips, that
robbed Bill of his resentment toward the cat. She fondled the small
creature, and came toward his couch; then, bending over him, she
deposited the kitten on his chest and kissed him on the lips. Bill
choked and gasped.

"You mustn't mind," she said, rosy now, "if I kiss you. The doctor told
me. You gave me most of your blood, and I lived. I was well in a day."

Before Bill could formulate an answer the father came in.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "you've waked up, have you? Good! We had
our doubts about it; for it took three days. We're almost to Gibraltar,
as the mate says."

"That's good," said Bill wearily, "but--is Miss Mayhew all right?"

"Got a hole in her side," answered the father, "and a hole in her arm;
but, tell me, you folks. Something happened, and I want to know."

"It was all my fault, daddy," said the girl. "This little cat
frightened me, and I think I went crazy again."

"I see," said the father, his face clouding. "I told you, Mr. Flanders,
to have no cats on board. Why is this?"

"Why," said Bill, "I'm sorry now, of course, but I found the brute
being tormented by a gang of toughs, and brought it with me. I never
dreamed that there would be any unpleasant consequences."

"But I knew," said the owner warmly. "This little girl of mine was
marked by her mother, who was frightened into insanity by a mad cat.
She has gone crazy several times at the sight of a cat."

"But not any more," said the smiling girl. "Come here, kitty, and let
me love you." She picked up the kitten, and fondled it. Then the doctor
appeared, and looked them all over with a stern, scientific eye.

The girl placed the kitten on Bill's chest, close to his chin, and
smilingly bade him pat it. But Bill, with a furious, though not
profane, exclamation, struck his former pet from him. The girl picked
it up, and consoled it, looking down on Bill with mild disapproval.

"Please pardon me," he said weakly, "but I hate the thing. I cannot
stand it."

"Don't worry, young man," said Doctor Calkins. "You'll come around all
right, and be as merciful to dumb animals as you have been, while our
little girl here is relieved from the obsession of her life. It has
never before come into my experience, but I have read about it in my
studies--transfusion of blood carries with it transference of psychic
qualities. This girl, in taking into her veins some of your blood, has
taken your love of cats--I know all about it, because I talked with the
mess boy--and you, in giving your blood to her, took something of her
obsession. But you will both get over it. Come, Mr. Mayhew, and leave
these people alone with the cat."

They went out, and the girl sat beside the weak and helpless man,
stroking his face and caressing him for an hour before he spoke a vital
word.

"Say," he said, at last. "Tell me, what is your first name?"

"Kitty," she answered.




                               THE TWINS


My acquaintance with them began, I may say, about fifteen years before
their birth; for I had played marbles with their father, made mud
pies with their mother, thrashed the former through his school-days,
and loved the latter from the beginning to the end--which is not yet.
Finally, I had officiated as best man at the wedding.

The twins were as like as two peas, and to preserve their identity the
usual expedient was tried of decorating them with ribbons of different
hue. But when, at three years of age, they were detected in the very
natural act of swapping ribbons, I, as the family physician, was called
in; then Jack's identity was fixed with a tattooed dot of india ink on
his left arm, and Jim's with a corresponding dot on his right. Their
mother was mostly concerned with their pain and protesting squalls,
their father with my wonderful ingenuity, and I with the rebellious,
yet imperious, thought that, according to the eternal fitness of
things, I should have been the father of these two beautiful boys.

Their father was about my age, twenty-five, and a weakling; one who,
as a boy, could never catch a ball nor throw one straight; who never
learned to swim, and preferred girls for playmates; who, as a youth,
could not dress himself without assistance; who never, in his whole
lackadaisical life, had an original thought or took the initiative in
any proceeding; and why that splendid, healthy-minded, dark-eyed girl
of seventeen should choose him out of a host of suitors was beyond
my comprehension at the time. Later, I understood; somewhat weakly
sexed at that age, but largely endowed with the maternal instinct (she
played with dolls until within a year of her marriage), she pitied his
helplessness and married him to mother and protect him. And from this
pair, so utterly diverse, Mother Nature produced two perfect specimens
of humanity, and rested. After their arrival the parents drifted apart,
and from sheer incompatibility were divorced when the boys were seven
years old. They went to their original homes at opposite sides of the
town, each taking a twin; for the asinine judge, unable to decide in
favor of either, had, Solomon-like, so conditioned the divorce.

Their grief was heart-rending--equaled only by that of the mother, as
I, in my professional relation to each home, had full opportunity to
judge. But time softened this grief in all of them, and brought about
in the mother a state of mind exceedingly valuable and gratifying
to me. In a year from the divorce she became my wife. So far I had
observed the development of the twins as a physician, noting that the
measles, mumps, croup, and other childhood ailments came to both at
the same time, and, as a physician, ascribing it to bodily contagion.
But now, still a physician to each, I took note of other concurrent
happenings that spoke of mental contagion as well. I was called to Jim
late one afternoon by the agitated father, and found him in a strange
mental condition, crying and laughing, and again storming in an ecstasy
of rage at the house-dog, a gentle, harmless collie and a former pet,
against whom he had conceived a violent hatred. He had attacked and
nearly killed him with a club.

When I reached home that evening I was regaled by the joyous Jack with
an account of his successful battle that afternoon with a mad dog that
had attacked him. It was a large, black mongrel, and he had brained it
with his ball club. I sounded his emotions. Frightened? Of course; who
would not be with a huge mad brute, frothing at the mouth, charging at
him? But he had staggered the animal with the first blow, and then had
come his courage, his anger, and his furious desire to kill, and save
his life. Yes, he had cried, afterward, and was much ashamed of the
weakness. But I reassured him on this point, convinced him that strong,
brave men sometimes cried under extreme excitement, and in my desire to
make the most of the incident in his development, almost overshot the
mark. His self-respect became abnormal, and neighboring dogs and small
boys suffered, until he was stopped by an experience more salutary than
would have been the strapping which his mother and I were seriously
contemplating. He attacked another dog, but a sane dog of small size
and attending to his business. This dog met the assault bravely and,
though suffering keenly from Jack's first blow and unable to injure
any living thing larger than a rabbit, offered a strong protest of
growls and barks, the moral effect of which was to send the small
boy fleeing for home with the small dog snapping at his heels. The
neighbors rejoiced, and it was a month before Jack recovered from the
humiliation. He did not understand, nor did I until the following day,
when his father informed me on the street that the collie, recovered
in mind and body, had revenged himself by attacking and biting Jim,
who was badly frightened and needed my attention. I could not learn
that there was concomitance of time, but I knew that the twins, a mile
apart, _shared each other's emotions_.

After a fruitless attempt to get legal transfer of Jim to my own
household, I fell back on my growing faith in this sympathy of mind,
trusting that a careful training of Jack might have a corresponding
influence upon Jim. But in this I hoped too much. No such sympathy
is ever as strong as daily and personal contact, and the direct and
weakening example of that father's life and words worked powerfully
upon the character of the boy. His individuality lessened, and as
though this lessening were an invitation, the apparently fortuitous
incidents and influences of his life became such as to lessen it still
further. He seemed to be looking for trouble, and would attempt feats
that he failed to perform, while Jack attempted such as were just
within his increasing powers. A boy that Jack had pummeled came around
and took revenge on Jim. He would yield to pressure that Jack would
resist.

And so they grew farther and farther apart in face, form, and
disposition, Jack into a tall, straight, handsome and high-minded
young gentleman, Jim into a shifty, cowardly, stoop-shouldered and
cad-like sort of a youth, without friends, ambition, or ideals, whose
backwardness in study brought him into the lowest class of the town's
one high school as Jack entered the highest. In this year of schooling
they met for the first time since the separation, but they met as
strangers. They knew they were brothers, of course, but carefully
avoided reference to the fact, and soon avoided each other. Between
them there was no outward sympathy nor community of interest, the
unwise but cast-iron pride of the mother finding expression in Jack's
attitude, and the cowardice of the negative father in Jim's.

Jack graduated with honor, and, confronted with another four years of
study at college, yet ardent, ambitious, anxious to begin life's battle
as a man, chose a career that satisfied both conditions--a life in the
navy. He arranged matters himself, secured an appointment to the Naval
Academy, and left us. And on that day, Jim, friendless in school and
stubborn, was dismissed from school for negligence in his studies.
Then, as though his evil star were now at its zenith, his father,
having lost all his inherited property in unwise speculation, took him
away, where I could not learn; but a year later we read the list of
lost in a coasting-steamship wreck, and in this list were the names of
these two.

I now had to deal with a half-crazed woman, who spoke little and did
not weep, but whose strained face and whitening hair told of the
strength of that misplaced pride and outraged mother-love, suppressed
for so many years. Nothing that I could say or do availed against the
aroused craving for the neglected boy. She resisted my oft-repeated
suggestions that Jim was gone, and that there was nothing to do but
to make the best of it. She refused to be resigned, for she could not
bring herself to believe that he was dead. She insisted that he was
alive, and that some day he would come back.

This continued through the years, while her hair became whiter and
her voice nearly silent, while Jack finished his course and sea term,
to be then retired against his will because of the preponderance of
officers in a wooden navy too small for them, and while my practice
and my health left me under the strain of caring for the queenly woman
I loved. Then Jack, a born free-lance who would have entered any navy
in the world had a war been on, did the next best thing for him; he
secured command of a large, new merchant ship, and made a successful
voyage, perhaps the youngest and probably the best educated master in
the merchant marine. When he returned my nerves were as bad as his
mother's, my practice was gone, my future uncertain; and so we accepted
his invitation to make a voyage with him, I with the listlessness of
all neurasthenics, my wife with an avidity which surprised us. She
brightened at once.

And now this story really begins.


                                  II

She was a two-thousand-ton, double topgallant and skysail yard
ship--one of the larger, slower type that succeeded the old Cape Horn
clippers, but a ship that even a naval officer might feel proud to
command; and Jack was certainly proud of her. And as we--his mother
and myself--watched him pacing the poop-deck as sail was being made,
giving an occasional quiet order to the helmsman or sending a brazen
roar forward to the mate on the forecastle, we were frankly proud of
him. Six feet tall to an inch, straight as a man may be, with a chest
almost as deep as his shoulders were broad, sunburned and brown-eyed,
with only a well-kept mustache to relieve the boyishness of his face,
he presented a picture that brought light into the eyes and a smile to
the face of that mother as she stood beside me. But a contrasting look
of pain followed, and I knew the thought behind was of the other boy,
of whom we never spoke.

The first mate was a huge, hairy, brutal sort of man, uneducated beyond
the mechanical formulas of navigation, but with a large and healthy
conception of his own value to the ship and her people. The second mate
was like him to a lesser extent--not quite so big, nor brutal, nor
profane, and with less of the art of navigation.

At eight bells of that first evening out the men were chosen into
watches by the two mates much as boys choose sides in a ball game, and
my wife and I drew amidships to witness the scene. They were an unkempt
lot in the moonlight, mostly foreigners, and clad in greasy and tarry
garments of nondescript pattern and shape. Each called out his name as
he was chosen, moving to starboard or port, according to the watch he
now belonged to, and when the job was half done Jack, smoking a cigar,
joined us and critically scanned his crew.

"Relieve the wheel and lookout," said the mate, when the last man was
chosen. "That'll do the watch."

"Wait!" said Jack sharply, tossing away his cigar and stepping toward
the dispersing men. "I've something to say to you."

They halted and drew together.

"This is my second voyage in the merchant marine," he continued. "The
last was my first. Before that I was in the navy, with the power of
the law and the Charlestown prison behind me in every order I gave to
a man. As a consequence of this condition no man-o'-war's man ever
refuses to obey an order, and few of them ever get to that prison. But
I brought such ideas with me when I took command of this ship. I spoke
kindly to my men and treated them well. I forbade my mates to bully or
strike them, and even ironed my second mate for ignoring my wishes. I
took sick and injured men aft and nursed them. But I found that I had
made a mistake. Merchant sailors can be jailed as easily as man-o-war's
men, but they don't know it. Knowing nothing, they fear nothing until
it comes to them. Orders were disobeyed on that voyage, and each man
was his own boss; ropes were never coiled up without an argument, gear
was rove off wrong, earings were passed farm-fashion, canvas was lost,
marlinespikes, capstan-bars, and draw-buckets went overboard, tar-pots
were dropped from aloft on a clean deck, and a paint-brush came down on
my head. Discipline went to the dogs, and I nearly lost my ship. Now
there'll be none of that here. As I won't have time nor inclination
to appeal to the law if you make trouble I mean to forestall it. I've
shipped mates that'll break your heads on the first provocation, and
they have my instructions to do it. So watch out. You'll get plenty of
grub while you deserve it, but when you don't it'll be all hands in the
afternoon and the government allowance. That'll do."

"That's all right, Cappen," said a big Irishman in a voice of rage.
"This is a Yankee ship, an' ye needn't ha' said all that. But I tell
ye, if ye'll pick out able seamen yerself in the shippin'-office, 'stid
o' lettin' a shippin'-master gi' ye barbers an' waiters that don't know
port from sta'board ye'll ha' no throuble wi' yer min. Luk at this
ye've gi'n us for a watchmate." He seized a man standing near, swung
him at arm's length, and flung him, spinning on his feet, full against
the first mate. That worthy, shocked out of his better judgment,
instead of rebuking the Irishman, drew back his mighty fist and struck
the staggering man in the face, sending him reeling back toward the
place he had come from. He slipped, stumbled, and fell, his head
striking the corner of the main hatch. They he lay quiet on the deck.

But a strange thing happened--strange and inconsistent with regard to
Jack's just-uttered declaration of his position. No sooner had the
mate struck the man than Jack, with a muttered curse, launched himself
toward his first officer, and knocked him against the fife-rail, where
he clung, choking and clucking. Jack struck him twice, once in the
face, once in the body. And now a stranger thing happened. It all
occurred so quickly that I could hardly take note, shaky of nerve as I
was and hampered by the distressed woman on my arm; but Jack, having
struck the mate, and before the still erect victim of the mate and the
Irishman had stumbled, had immediately bounded toward the Irishman. But
as the luckless fellow's head struck the hatch combing, Jack brought
up, and with a low, inarticulate whimper and a face like that of a
frightened child looked this way and that, then sped aft toward the
poop steps. We followed, while the second mate dispersed the men, and
found Jack in a strange condition of terror, unnatural to him, or to
any man of his type. His agitated mother endeavored to soothe him, but
between her motherly admonitions to Jack came wifely admonitions to me
to attend to the poor man who had been so brutally maltreated.

So I went forward, passing on the way the two mates, the one assisting
the other. As I passed, the second mate called out that the other's
jaw-bone and some ribs were broken, and that my services were needed;
but, feeling enough of indignation to make the brutal first mate the
last on my list of patients, I went on, and found the mistreated sailor
in the port forecastle, where he had been carried by his shipmates. He
was sitting on a chest, just recovering his senses, and looking about
in a dazed manner out of swollen and blackened eyes. As the men parted
to make way for me Jack's mighty voice sounded from amidships: "Weather
main-brace, here. Where's the watch? Where's the second mate? Attend to
your yards, sir." Obviously, Jack was himself again.

"I didn't mean to hit the mate wi' him, sorr," said the big Irishman
deferentially, "an' it was a dom shame for the mate to slug him like
that, even if he was no sailor. But the skipper's a brick. Be-gob,
he'll 'tind to that bunco mate."

"Are you hurt much?" I asked of the victim. He looked into my face,
then, rising, burst forth:

"Doctor, doctor, take me away from here. Take me out of this place.
They hit me and curse me because I don't know things. I don't know
why I am here--I don't know where I am." The broken voice became a
wail. "I'm on the water again and I'll drown, I know I'll drown. Oh,
doctor"--he seized my arm--"I'm Jim; don't you know me, doctor?"

"Jim?" I queried. "Jim who?" and turned him to the light.

"Look, doctor. You did this, they told me, when I was a baby." He
pulled up the right sleeve of a ragged, filthy shirt, and showed me a
dot of india ink just below the elbow.

"For God's sake, are you Jim, the twin brother of Jack? We all thought
you were dead--drowned with your father."

"He was drowned, doctor. I floated on a piece of board and was saved. I
went crazy for a while, and then--I never could get along. I couldn't
get work, and things got worse and worse, and then I took to the road,
and then I came to New York, and--I guess I got drunk, and got here."

"Shanghaied, that's what ye were," grunted the Celt.

I looked closely at Jim's face. Aside from the facial angle and the
color of his eyes there was no resemblance to the brother who, at seven
years of age, had been his counterpart. A badly kept beard added to
the discrepancy, no doubt, but the whole atmosphere of the man was
different. There was a slight reminder of Jack in the lower tones of
the voice, but its usual note was a whine, and in his whole bearing was
the slinking aspect of a vagrant of the worst kind. Certainly, I could
not take this human wreck into the presence of that mother and brother.

"You must stay here for a while, Jim," I said firmly. "You must not
come near the other end of the ship unless I give you permission, and
I will see that you are protected and cared for. Understand? Stay here
with these men, and I will see you every day. What is your name?" I
asked the Irishman.

"Limerick, sorr--aboard ship."

"Limerick, you seem to be a man, and a square one. This is an old
friend of mine--and of my family--but you can understand that he must
stay here. See that he is well treated, and I will make it right with
you."

"I will that, sorr," answered Limerick promptly, "though I belong in
the other watch an' ought to be on deck now. I don't wonder ye're
ashamed o' him, sorr. I'm ashamed meself. Just the same I'll break the
sconce o' the first mon that lays hands on him. I'll do that for ye,
sorr. I know a gintleman, an' ye're one, or ye wouldn't be here in this
fo'c'sle."

I went aft and joined Jack and his mother on the poop, forgetting the
mate's need of my services in the mood I was in.

"Dad," said Jack, addressing me by the name he had called me since I
had become his stepfather, "you're a physician. Tell me what ails me.
I'm all right now, but I went for the mate for doing just what I had
told him to do, and then went into a blue funk over it--frightened out
of my senses. But what at? I'm not afraid of any man aboard."

"How is the poor man that was struck?" asked my wife anxiously.

"He's all right," I answered promptly, understanding now her
instinctive concern, and inclined to smile at Jack's palpable
resentment of it.

"But what's the matter with _me_?" he demanded sharply.

"I don't know, Jack," I said. "I'll have to think it out."

His mention of the mate had recalled to me the plight he was in, and
I went to him, finding that the second mate's diagnosis was correct.
Two ribs and his jaw-bone were smashed as though from the kick of
a mule. I bound him in plasters, and stoically endured his mumbled
profanity; then, first seeing my wife to her berth in the after
cabin, and thoroughly exhausted by the exciting experiences, I took a
sleeping-draught to quiet my nerves and went to my own berth in the
forward cabin.

But, perhaps because of the intensity of the strain upon my nervous
system, perhaps because of my strong interest in the problem, the
sleeping-draught merely threw me into a logical, inductive frame of
mind that kept me awake all night, thinking it out. And it was daylight
before the problem took shape. After years of separation the twins
again shared each other's emotions.


                                  III

With the problem still unsolved, however, I went to sleep, and awakened
at eight bells of the afternoon watch. Going on deck, I found a gale of
wind blowing out of the southeast, the ship hove down under the three
lower topsails, spanker, spencer, and foretopmast staysail, and liquid
hills of greenish-gray bombarding the weather-bow and occasionally
climbing aboard. Jack, clad in yellow oilskins and sou'wester, stood on
the poop in a fleeting patch of sunlight, trying to get an afternoon
sight with his sextant as the sun peeped from behind the racing
storm-clouds. Jim was also on the poop, but on the lee side, scurrying
forward along the alley in advance of the irate second mate, who was
profanely criticizing Jim's bad taste in coming to relieve the wheel
without knowledge of steering or of the compass. Jack, busy with the
sextant, did not witness the scene, nor hear the profanity; but I,
having a personal and domestic interest in the matter, met the officer,
returning after a final kick at Jim, and softly but intensely informed
him that such language must cease within hearing of my wife, or I
would deal with him as man to man. He apologized, in his way, and I
then gave him the reasons I had given Limerick for keeping Jim out of
sight, and secured his coöperation. Limerick was at the wheel, scowling
in sympathy with me, and he whispered as I passed that it would not
have happened had he been forward--that the men of the other watch had
driven Jim aft to relieve the wheel before they had learned his status.

I joined Jack. He seemed himself, showing no sign of the night's
agitation; yet he looked a little worried.

"Couldn't get a sight, dad," he said, swinging his sextant at arm's
length, and smiling, rather sadly, I thought. "But the Long Island
coast is about ten miles under the lee. How'd you like to drown at the
end of a cable to-night?"

"Why," I asked, "is there any danger?"

"We're on the wrong tack, I think; but I expected it to veer to the
east. It hangs right on from sou'-sou'east--dead on to the beach, and
as it is it don't make much difference which tack we're on if we hit.
If it shows the slightest sign of hauling to the west I'll wear ship
and try to clear Montauk. If it don't, it's the anchors."

"Why not wear ship now?--whatever that is," I answered.

"Couldn't clear it anyway with the wind this way, and I'd only lose a
full mile to leeward. Our drift under this canvas is quartering, and
about three miles an hour."

"Is there no other recourse than wearing ship?"

"Clubhauling, if the wind shifts too late to wear. You see, wearing
is putting a ship on the other tack by squaring away before the wind
and then rounding to. Clubhauling is going about head to wind with the
help of the lee anchor. It's about the most difficult operation in
seamanship. We did it once in the _Monocacy_, but few merchant skippers
learn the trick."

All this was unintelligible to me at the time, and I went down to my
wife. I found her as comfortable as a woman may be in her first storm
at sea, and then paid a professional visit to the first officer. Then
I went forward on the reeling main-deck to see and encourage the
unfortunate Jim. On the way I thought seriously of taking Jack into my
confidence, but gave it up when I considered that the shock and mental
agitation might not be well for him with his ship in danger. Then I
thought of the alternative--could I not arouse a little courage in Jim,
so that if a critical moment arrived Jack would not be obsessed with
his cowardice, as he was the preceding evening? It was worth trying--at
least worth thinking of. In any event Jim would be none the worse for a
little bracing up.

I found him shivering in his wet garments, crouching from the blast of
cold rain and spindrift under the weather-rail near the fore-rigging.

"Doctor," he sobbed, "take me away from these fellers. They hit me and
kick me, and I'm afraid. I haven't a friend here but you."

"Jim," I asked kindly, "do you really believe me to be your friend?
Have you full confidence that I can help you?"

"Yes, yes, doctor. You were always good to me, in the old days. And you
married mother. Where is she, and Jack? Jack never cared for me, but
I'd like to see mother 'fore I die."

"You shall see her sometime, Jim, but not yet--not for a long time,
perhaps. You are worn out and want sleep. You want dry clothes and a
good, long sleep, and you'll feel all right when you wake up. Stay here
and when I beckon to you, come."

I had made up my mind. Going aft, I found my wife in the forward
companionway, where she had been watching me. Her first question was
of the poor fellow forward, and I said what I could to quiet the
instinctive mother-love that she herself could not analyze. I told her
that the man needed only a little care, which I was giving him. Then,
when I had led her aft to her quarters, I sought the cabin steward,
adjured him to silence, and arranged for exclusive possession of the
forward cabin stateroom that adjoined my own. Going on deck, I imposed
the same condition upon the second mate (who was beginning to respect
me), and beckoned to the expectant Jim. He came on the run, and I soon
had him in that room, with his wet rags exchanged for a dry suit of my
own, and no one the wiser but the second mate and the steward, both of
whom considered him a sick man taken aft for treatment. Which was more
or less the truth.

Giving Jim a stimulant, I put him into the berth and covered him,
for he still shivered from the chill of the storm. Then, holding his
hand, I began a gentle, soothing flow of words in which I assured him
that I was his friend, that I would so continue, that he was in no
danger while I was with him, but that he must go to sleep, and rest,
and that when he wakened he would feel braver and stronger, like his
brother Jack, whom he surely must remember. In a few moments his
eyelids had ceased to flutter, and soon after they closed under the
steady, monotonous lullaby of my voice; but he was not yet asleep, and
I continued, enjoining upon the weary, homeless, and desolate waif
again and again--speaking more emphatically as his breathing grew
heavier--that he must be like Jack, as he was when they were little
boys together and shared the same impulses; that he must hark back to
that time, and rouse up the strong, brave soul, common to each, which
had developed in Jack, but which in him had been suppressed by years
of continued defeat. Strongly insisting upon this toward the last, I
finally left him, having actually talked him to sleep.

On deck I found Jack really worried. "If it would only shift," he said,
"one way or the other. But here it is, hanging on out of the same
quarter, and blowing harder. The storm-center is inland, and coming
right at us. See the land yonder?"

A dim line of yellowish brown showed faintly through the dense blanket
of gray to leeward--the only visible border between sea and sky. Two
hours more would bring us perilously close.

Supper was served, and I ate, hurriedly and ravenously, my first meal
in twenty-four hours; then I prepared my wife for what might come,
saw that she was dressed warmly, and brought her on deck, where Jack
supperless and anxious paced the deck abaft the house and watched the
wind and compass. Forward, all hands, under the second mate, worked at
the two chain cables in the lessening light of the evening, hauling
them up from the lockers and ranging them ready for use. Occasionally,
in the intervals of work, the men would look keenly aft and to leeward
at the approaching line of coast. Every face wore a look of anxiety;
all knew of the danger.

When the cables were ranged a quiet order from Jack brought a cast of
the lead. Twelve fathoms was the finding.

"Lord grant we hit close to a life-saving station," said Jack, looking
fondly at his mother. "No boats could live a minute in this sea. We're
not far from the storm center. It's got to shift six points at least to
clear us, now. I'll get ready to clubhaul, anyway."

An order to the tired but very efficient second mate resulted in two
strong hawsers being brought up from the forepeak, coiled one each side
on the poop abaft the house, and the ends led forward outside of all
rigging to the hawsepipes in the bow, into which they were passed. Then
another sounding was taken, showing ten fathoms of water.

"About half an hour more," said Jack to the second mate. "Fake your
braces down for going about, and have the carpenter stand by at the
windlass with a top-maul and a punch to slip the chain at any shackle."
The officer stared in amazement, but went forward to execute the
orders. Evidently, he knew as little of their portent as did I.

He reported in time, "All ready for stays, sir," and we waited. There
was nothing more to do, it seemed, with the ship blowing almost
straight on to a lee shore. Again was the lead cast, and nine fathoms
was the result called out.

"All hands on deck, and stand by on the poop," roared Jack through his
hands. The men trooped aft and crowded the weather alley.

A tall, unkempt figure with face tied up in cloths lumbered up the poop
steps and approached Jack. "I b'long on deck, Cappen," he mumbled. "Can
I be any good?"

"No, sir," answered Jack kindly, but sharply; "you cannot; but stay on
deck and be ready for swimming."

The injured mate bowed his head and, first looking at the compass, then
painfully aloft at the wind-vane, seated himself on the wheel-box. His
chance of swimming was poor; he could hardly stand.

The steward came up, muffled to the chin in a long overcoat, and the
sight of him brought to my mind poor Jim, lying asleep in a cabin
berth. Down the after companionway I rushed, but was hardly clear of
the stairs before I felt the ship heel still farther under a furious
blast of wind, then straighten nearly upright; and over and above the
sound of rattling canvas came Jack's thundering roar: "Keep full.
Hard up your wheel. Stand by for stays. Down off--" Something had
interrupted the order. I heard my wife scream, but I hurried into the
forward cabin after Jim, just in time to see him leave the stateroom
and dart out through the forward door.

I followed him out, but he was not in sight on the main deck, nor was
he among the men floundering down the poop steps to stations. So I
mounted to the poop; and there, prone upon his back in the alley, was
the unconscious form of Jack, with blood upon his face, and his mother
bending over him.

"The wind shifted, and the mizzen royal-yard shook out of her," said
the second mate from near the wheel, "and something came down and hit
him on the head."

Lifting my wife to her feet, I examined him hurriedly, but found no
cause for alarm. He was simply stunned by some falling object. "Let him
lie where he is, and he'll come to directly," I said, and, leaving him
to his mother, I joined the second mate to ask of Jim.

But a voice from the top of the house interrupted my query--a voice
like the blast of a speaking-trumpet, strangely like Jack's. And
there was Jim beside the mizzenmast, bareheaded and erect, his
stoop-shoulders squared, his eyes staring straight before him into the
horizontal rain and drift from the combers. "Ready about," he had said
in that borrowed voice. "Hard alee!"

My wife screamed again, stood up, and stared at the figure on the
house, and in a bound I had reached her.

"It's your boy Jim," I said in her ear, "but keep quiet. He's asleep."
She knew what I meant, and stood still, staring with wide-open, hungry
eyes at Jim, with an occasional downward glance at Jack.

"Get down off that house," sang out the second mate angrily.

"Let him alone," I shouted, "and do what he orders. Do you hear? Obey
his orders to the letter. They will be correct."

I hardly knew this myself, but the second mate believed me. He
motioned to the helmsman, who ground the wheel hard down. Forward,
the forecastle men had let go the foretopmast staysail sheet, and
this sail flapped furiously as the ship came slowly up to the wind. I
hastened to the compass and looked. Though I could not have named the
points, I could see that the wind was now blowing from the southwest,
and that the ship _had_ been heading nearly straight for that line of
sand. I went back to my wife, and Jim turned his expressionless face
and sleepy eyes toward the second mate, who had nervously followed me.

"Go forward," Jim commanded; "cockbill and stand by the lee anchor to
let go at the word; then stand by with the carpenter to make fast the
spring-line to the chain forward of the windlass, and to slip the chain
at the first shackle abaft. And send two men aft to attend this line at
the quarter-bitt."

"Aye, aye, sir," answered the astounded officer, hastening to obey.

Limerick was one of the men sent aft to the spring-line, and his
amazement exceeded that of the other. "Goin' to clubhaul her," he said
to me, "an' he don't know the compass, he's only a barber man an' no
sailor. It beats my goin' to sea."

With my arm about my wife I watched the somnambulist, ready to speak
to him if I thought the occasion warranted it, ready to prevent
others from speaking; for the sleepy mind of Jim--or the soul of the
unconscious Jack, if you like--might obey an unwise or misleading word,
even now.

Slowly and more slowly the great ship came up against the pounding of
the southerly seas, wavered, and stopped with the weather leech of the
maintopsail just lifting.

"Let go the lee anchor," thundered Jim. The anchor was dropped, and the
chain rattled out of the hawse-pipe.

"Maintopsail haul," came the next order from Jim in the same vibrant
voice. The lee main- and weather cro'-jack braces were cast off, and
the after yards came around with a swing and a crash that threatened
to take them out of her; but they held, and the opposite braces were
tautened.

"Is Jim a sailor, too?" my wife whispered.

"No," I answered gently. "He is doing Jack's work for him. Thank God
for your boy to-night. He is saving our lives."

Slowly the ship's head sagged away from the wind; then it stopped and a
tremor went through her. The anchor had bit, but was dragging.

"Pay out on that chain," roared Jim to the forecastle, then to Limerick
he said quietly, "Catch a turn with that spring and stand by to slack
away."

"Very good, sorr," answered Limerick, as he took a turn with the line
around the bitt. "Oh, he's a navy officer, all right, sorr," he said
joyously, but softly to me. "I've been there an' I know 'em."

Again the ship's nose drew up into the wind under the strain of the
still dragging anchor, and when head to it, with the foretopsail aback
and tending to throw her still farther, Jim called out: "Hang on to
your chain. Make fast the spring to the chain, and knock out the
shackle-pin." Then he waited a moment or two, until the heaving ship
unmistakably pointed to the southward of the wind's eye, and shouted:
"All hands on the forebraces. Fore bowline. Let go and haul. Slip the
chain." Then quietly to Limerick: "Handsomely on that spring when the
strain comes. Don't part it."

"Aye, aye, sir," laughed Limerick. "I've been in the service, sorr."

"Not a word to him," I said, bounding toward Limerick. "Not a word. He
knows what he is doing."

The end of the chain had rattled out of the hawse-pipe and under the
tension of the line to the quarter the big ship was paying off to the
southward, while the men slowly hauled the foreyard around. When it
finally filled and was steadied, and the ship brought up as high as she
would lay, the last of the spring-line slipped out of Limerick's hands
and went overboard. And now the big first mate, who had quietly watched
the whole operation from the wheel-box, approached and studied the
compass.

"The wind is hauling all the time," he said through his swollen jaws,
"and we'll have a fair wind to the open sea. But who is that man? He
kept her off the beach. She'd 'a' hit in a few minutes more."

"He's captain of the ship," I answered.

But Jim was not acting like a captain now. He ran to the monkey-rail at
the side of the house, and partly climbed over to descend. Then he went
back and resumed his position at the mizzenmast. Then he made another
attempt, succeeded, and, gaining the alley, sped forward to the steps
and went down them. A groan from Jack, followed by his mother's cry of
sympathy, apprised me of the reason. Jack was recovering consciousness,
and after assuring myself that he was in his right mind, I left him,
still dazed and stupid, in the care of his mother, and leisurely
followed Jim, finding him just where I expected to--sound asleep in the
stateroom berth. I wakened him, and he sat up, blinking at me.

"Lordy, what a dream, doctor. Mother and Jack--oh, I forget," he said
sleepily. "And something hit me on the head--here." He felt of the spot
on his head where Jack had been struck.

"Come out on deck, Jim," I said, and he followed me.

"How do you feel now, Jim?"

"Fine, doctor, but where's this boat going, I'd like to know?"

"Feel afraid of the water, now?"

"Not a bit. Why, it can't hurt anyone, can it--unless you fall into it?"

"Afraid of those men forward, Jim?"

"No, I'm not." His face took on a look of defiance. "Why, doctor, I
could lick most o' that crowd, couldn't I? I feel different, somehow.
But that dream, doctor, about mother and Jack. That dream meant
something. Where are they, and how are they?"

"Come below, Jim."

This is not a story of sentiment, so that reunion will not be
described. This story is a question, with a large interrogation point.
The question is: What is the human soul? Is it an entity, or a possible
merging of entities? Is it a collection of memory clusters, any of
which may assume an individuality, or is it a series of mental planes
or concentric spheres? Jack is Jack and Jim is Jim, and there is a
separate ego to each. But what part of Jim's soul left him to obsess
Jack during the fracas forward when Jack was awake, and why did it not
come again before Jack was struck down, and when he was but normally
disturbed over the ship's peril. And how much or how little of Jack
went into Jim under my suggestion to the latter to be like him, which
waited until Jack was unconscious before acting, and which left him
when Jack awoke to claim it?

We are sailing south with a crew and a first mate that think Jim a
fugitive from justice, protected by the skipper, and with a second mate
who thinks me the devil and Jim my familiar. There is a white-haired,
happy woman growing young in her aroused mother-love; and there is a
former very promising hobo developing surprising qualities of mind and
seamanship under mine and Jack's tutelage. But from none of these can
I get any light. I am only a village practitioner, and I submit the
question to others: What is the human soul?




                             THE BROTHERS


It is popularly believed that twins grow up in mutual love and
loyalty--and, when properly reared, this is not only probable,
but almost imperative--but these two grew up in mutual hatred and
antagonism; even though in face, form, brain, mind, and soul they
were as alike as the proverbial peas in a pod. They received the same
limited education in the same schools and classes, and up to the period
of this story were never apart; not because either so chose, but
because of the common influences of their environment, which decreed
the same paths and channels of thought and initiative.

They were orphans, and had their home with an illiterate stepfather,
whose early mistake of punishing one child for the fault of the other
raised the first barrier between them. The guilty boy was amused at the
mistake; but the victim, smarting with pain and a sense of injustice,
could not appreciate the humor of the situation, and waited for a
reversal of conditions, which, not happening immediately, he brought
about by a deliberate offense and an accusation of the other.

Then followed reprisal met with reprisal and in time each boy hated the
other with a hatred that dominated all other emotions, and, inspired
by previous grievance, would hesitate at no dishonorable and unboyish
trick whereby he might create trouble for him. It was genuine community
of soul; for it manifested itself in other and more pleasing ways, and
without mutual prompting. If one felt like playing hooky, the other
felt the impulse, and they would come together; but only to separate
with snarls. If one liked another boy, the twin shared the liking; and,
conversely, each disliked the enemy of the other, though never to the
point of defending him. They fought each other often; but never was
victory given to either. Each battle was a draw, and supremacy could
not be established; for neither would surrender until the other was
ready to.

So conditioned, physically, mentally, and morally, the cumulative
effect of the vicarious suffering of each brought them to the murder
mind when, at nineteen, they fell in love with the same maiden. The
episode need only be mentioned. They made love in the same way, and the
maiden repulsed each with the same catholic impartiality. Neither might
have won her alone; but both thought so, and in the furious battle with
fists, stones, and clubs that followed they received injuries which,
with the stepfatherly horse-whipping that came to them, laid them up
for a week. Had they been endowed with a sense of humor, or had they
been separated long enough to acquire one, they might have been spared
the soul-consuming malignancy that now possessed them; as it was, each
rose from bed while hardly able to walk, and, resolved to get away
from the other, ran away from home, stowing away in the same ship, a
three-skysail yarder bound to Sydney.

These things I learned from the maiden referred to, whose father
commanded the big ship, and from later inquiry in their native village.
From now on, however, they were more or less under my immediate
attention; for I was second mate of that ship.

Mr. Butterell, the first mate, hauled Bill out of the paint locker
about the same time that I found Tom in the lazarette, and we brought
the two together under the break of the poop for the captain's
inspection and decision. It was plain from their faces as they eyed
each other that neither had expected to find the other on board;
but, after glaring at each other for a moment, they assumed a moody
indifference, which left them only for an instant when a low voice on
the poop above said, "Why, Papa! The Landon boys!"

I was surprised myself--though agreeably so--for I did not know that
Mabel was to make the voyage with us, and, looking up to where she
stood with her father, I received a nod and a smile.

A little here, in parenthesis, about myself. I was twenty-four, and had
sailed four voyages with Captain Merwin, the last two as second mate,
mainly to keep in touch with this girl who, as a child of fourteen,
had been my shipmate on the first. And because of this I felt a secret
disappointment that the captain had not signed me first mate on this
occasion instead of second; for I had entertained a youthful hope and
ambition to present myself to her as her father's first officer when
we met again. But the highly efficient, handsome, and self-confident
Mr. Butterell had forestalled me in this; though I did not dream at
the time that he would also forestall me with Mabel, or that the two
loutish stowaways had attempted to.

They were tall, well built, and with a look of crafty intelligence in
their faces, which, with their embarrassment and their ill-fitting
clothes, bespoke the village loafer. Only by these clothes could they
be told apart. They were exactly alike, each with the same red hair,
high cheekbones, and squinting green eyes, and each chewed tobacco and
spat on the deck in a way to bring disapproval to the face of the gray
old skipper.

"You are stowaways," he said, "and, as my daughter informs me,
brothers, from my own home town. Why have you done this?"

"To get away from him," grunted Tom, jerking his thumb toward Bill. "I
hate him like so much pizen."

"And you?" asked the skipper of Bill.

"I didn't know I'd find him here," answered Bill with a vindictive
squint at Tom, "or I wouldn't ha' come."

"Twin brothers," commented the captain, "and on bad terms! Well, you
will have little time to quarrel aboard this ship, and plenty of time
to make friends. It is too late to get rid of you; so you must work.
Put them in separate watches, Mr. Butterell."

"Yes, sir," answered Mr. Butterell, reaching for Bill. "I choose you,"
he added, as his grip closed on Bill's collar. Then he swung him at
arm's length aft toward the poop then forward with all his strength,
hurling him, rolling and scrambling wildly, fully thirty feet along the
deck. Then, with a quick, self-satisfied smirk up at those on the poop,
he repeated the feat upon Tom.

Now a few words about Mr. Butterell. He was, all in all, the most
efficient executive officer I had ever sailed with. He knew his
business, from knotting a rope yarn up to masting a ship. In shortening
sail he could get canvas in as though it obeyed an intelligent
knowledge of his wish; but it was really because of his wonderful voice
and vocabulary. He never missed or repeated an order, and could send
his words against a gale from the poop to the weather fore earing as
distinctly and articulately as he would read off morning sights to the
skipper.

Unlike myself, a graduate of the schoolship St. Mary, he had worked his
way up from the forecastle; yet he had mastered more of navigation
than do most merchant skippers, and could figure great circle sailing
and take star and lunar sights. Besides, as I learned on further
association with him, he possessed a conversational power rare in
seafaring men, but developed in him by wide reading and wide-open eyes.
Added to this, he had the build and strength of a giant, the agility
of a panther, the fistic skill of a prize-fighter--and the vanity of a
spoiled child.

He seemed unable to perform the most commonplace action without a
half-involuntary and quick look around to notice some possible token
of approval, and in the absence of his social or professional equals
would seek it from the men, even from the Chinese cook. And with this
weakness was allied another, still more incompatible with his assured
mental and physical strength--an active hatred for the class of men
from which he had risen. It was the first of these that had prompted
that quick smirk toward the poop, and the second that impelled him to
follow the two human projectiles and, with kicks, clouts, and forceful
language, hasten their progress forward.

It was nearly four bells of the first dog-watch, or, more explicitly,
about ten minutes to six in the evening, of the first day out, and
though the watches had not yet been chosen half the crew had gone to
supper at three bells, when the day's work was done, and now, having
finished, had struggled out of the forecastle lighting their pipes.
Also the captain, his daughter, and Mr. Butterell had eaten supper; but
the rest of the men and myself would not have ours until four bells.
Hence, for the time, all hands were on deck to witness the breaking in
of the stowaways.

I could see no approval in the faces of the men as they watched the
brutal spectacle, and in Mabel's, as I glanced upward, I saw horror and
fright; but in Captain Merwin's face was nothing to indicate approval
or disapproval. My own, however, must have reflected the strong disgust
that I felt; for the captain, seizing his daughter's arm, said, "Come,
Mabel," and led her aft.

"Afraid," I muttered bitterly, "to antagonize his fancy first mate!"
For Captain Merwin was a kindly man, and I had often heard him correct
his officers for assaulting the men.

The exhibition of prowess went merrily on, Mr. Butterell using the
helpless youths like billiard balls, knocking one against the other
and frequently making a carom against the rail. But at the main hatch,
after a peculiarly successful fist play in which both brothers struck
the rail and clung to it, Mr. Butterell turned his head quickly, looked
aft with the smirking expectancy of his face, and, finding the audience
for which he had performed no longer at the break of the poop, gave
over the play, and started aft with his face as sober as my own.

And before he had taken three steps one of the brothers--I could not
tell which at the distance--wrenched an iron belaying pin from the
rail and hurled it at his head. It missed; but continued on a flat
trajectory to the cabin, from which it rebounded after making an
inch dent and whirled forward again and over the lee rail. Had Mr.
Butterell's head stopped it, he would never have moved or spoken again.

He wheeled when the pin whizzed by him, and with a bound put himself
between the two and the forecastle; for each had turned forward.

"Who threw that belaying pin?" he said quietly but menacingly.

"He throwed it; I didn't," answered one, pointing to the other.

"He lies!" retorted the accused one. "He throwed it himself."

"I lie, do I?"

"Yes, you lie!"

And then they were at each other's throats. Forgetting the common
enemy, they clenched tightly and whirled about the deck, bending
this way and that, striving to trip each other, striking with short
uppercuts, and even attempting to bite. But at this the interested men
forward crowed aft with sober faces, and Mr. Butterell, sensing their
mood, stepped jauntily past the fighters and came aft with an amused
smile on his face. Before he reached my vicinity I saw the men part the
two and lead them forward.

"Did you," said Mr. Butterell to me, his smile leaving him as he looked
at me, "did you, I say, see which one threw that pin?"

"I saw it thrown, sir," I answered; "but I could not tell which one
threw it."

"And wouldn't tell me if you could!" he sneered. "I can see that in
your face."

"Mr. Butterell," I said as calmly as was possible, "if I knew which one
threw it, I should tell you; for their unbrotherly conduct just now
destroyed what sympathy I may have felt for them."

"Sympathy for them!" he exploded. And now I knew the animus of his
heckling of me--his audience was again looking down at us. "Sympathy
for them!" He shook one finger under my nose. "Now I'll tell you, young
fellow," he continued, "before we go any further, that I'm first mate
of this craft and I'll dictate the sympathies of any man under me!"

"And I'm second," I retorted hotly, "with a right to sympathize with
whom I like! And take your hand away from my face, Mr. Butterell!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me forestall any sympathy I may have aroused for myself. I am not
the hero of this story. There is a heroine, but no hero; for neither
the mild-natured Captain Merwin, half hypnotized by the dashing Mr.
Butterell into a surrender of his principles, Mr. Butterell, actuated
by the cheapest motives of vanity and self-love, nor myself, embittered
by disappointment, jealousy, and other unworthy emotions--none of us,
I say, acted a heroic part from beginning to end. Mr. Butterell took
his hand away from my face, as I had demanded; but it became a fist and
came back.

I parried the blow and struck back at his face; but it was like
parrying a battering ram and striking a stone wall. It was the only
blow I struck in that fight, if fight it may be called. He was larger,
heavier, and quicker than myself, and soon I felt his fist crashing
between my eyes, and my world went out in a blinding flash of light. I
came to in a few moments, I think, and found myself in the lee scuppers
with Mabel bending over me, her face all sympathy and kindliness. I
could barely see it between my closing eyelids; but could also see
Mr. Butterell standing up to windward with Captain Merwin, laughingly
explaining his code of ethics. "Yes, sir," he was saying. "I consider
that there's less difference between your second mate and the dubs I
kicked forward than between myself and a captain. That goes, Captain
Merwin, or you can put me aboard the first inbound ship!"

I struggled to my feet and, pushing past Mabel, approached the two as
the captain answered, "Yes, yes, Mr. Butterell, I understand; but I am
sorry, very sorry. I had hoped--I hope there will be no more fighting."

"No, sir," I broke in rather insanely, "there'll be no more fighting
with fists, I promise you that. But let me say to you, sir," I faced
Mr. Butterell, "that there's less difference between you and a dead
man than there is between you and a captain. If you ever strike me
again, I'll kill you, if I have to knife you through your window while
you are asleep."

Then, as though it were a deathknell, four bells struck at the wheel.

I spoke loudly in my rage, and pain, and blindness--for I could not see
them now--and I know my words rang through the ship from end to end,
and must have been heard by the listening crew, for a few responsive
whoops came from forward. But also came a shivery "Oh, oh!" from Mabel,
and stern words from the captain.

"Tut, tut, Mr. Rogers!" he said. "That will do! You are setting a bad
example to the men. Go to your room, bathe your eyes, and get your
supper. If you cannot stand watch at eight bells, I will stand watch
for you; but no more of this talk of killing! I did not think it of
you!"

And, to the sound of Mr. Butterell's soft, derisive chuckling, he half
led, half pushed me into the companion to my room on the starboard side
of the passage. With the exception of the log desk in the mate's room,
the two apartments were similar, each with a window looking out on the
main deck, and another, over the berth opening into the alley. I could
not eat, and as I crawled blindly into the berth, like a bad boy sent
supperless to bed, and opened the window to let air in on my fevered
face, I could not help thinking how easy it would be to carry out my
threat. In imagination I did so; but I was not yet sane.

While few men pass through life without at least one sound thrashing
from schoolmate or fellow man, still fewer, I think, receive that
thrashing under such peculiarly humiliating conditions as those
attending mine, and fewer yet, at my age, know that vengeance,
properly disregarded, will take care of itself. So I fumed through
the dog-watch, listening to the hateful sound of the mate's voice--now
chatting with Mabel, again raised in a roaring behest to the men--and
to the still more hateful sound of Mabel's musical laughter at his
sallies, until seven bells, when he called the men to the pumps,
which, whether the ship leaks or not, are manned at this time of day.
Then the captain came with the steward, prescribed remedies from the
medicine chest, and gave me such fatherly, grieved, and reprehensive
admonishment as to irritate me past all silence and endurance.

"Look out, sir," I said at last, "that you don't get yours!"

"What do you mean, sir?" he asked sternly as he drew back from me. "Do
you threaten me, Mr. Rogers?"

"No, captain, I do not," I answered. "I mean that he has practically
threatened you. I heard him claim equality with you in your presence,
after picking this quarrel with me and then likening me to the
stowaways. I am your second mate. He will treat you the same, sir, when
it suits him."

"Nonsense, young man!"

"No nonsense about it, captain!" I raved. "There'll be trouble aboard
this ship yet, trouble that'll be none o' my making. Why didn't you
ship a Bengal tiger and be done with it? You could ha' got one cheaper
than a mate's pay for the passage."

"I begin to think you resent my shipping any kind of mate, except
yourself."

"Or why didn't you go to a drygoods store, if you wanted a ladykiller
to fool your daughter," I continued, forgetting the "sir" in my anger
and jealousy.

"My daughter? What do you mean, sir, by such reference to my daughter?"

"Oh, haven't you caught on yet, Captain Merwin?" I asked, as
recklessly and sarcastically as an unlicked schoolboy. "Not twelve
hours on board, and he not only knocks me out, but makes love over my
window to the girl I've worked and waited for since I saw her as a
child. What d'you s'pose, captain, that I've stuck to this ship for? To
have everything taken by him, and then remain satisfied? Well, I s'pose
I'll have to be satisfied. He's evidently just the kind of man she
likes. Some women prefer a brute to a man."

I paused for lack of breath, and Captain Merwin remained silent for
a moment or two; then he said quietly, "You are unfit to talk or to
think, much less to work. I will choose your men and stand your watch
until you are well. Meanwhile, go to sleep. I will apprise my daughter
of your opinion of her."

But as he left my room I felt that he would not need to. Through my
open window came Mr. Butterell's gleeful snicker and the soft murmur of
Mabel's voice as they moved away.

I was able to see in three days, and returned to duty, first offering
to Captain Merwin from my cooler and saner viewpoint an apology for
my manner, which he graciously accepted. But I made no apology to Mr.
Butterell, nor even a withdrawal of my threat, preferring to let it
hang over him as a possible deterrent. As it was a "watch and watch"
ship, we met only at eight bells, to report the course, distance
run, and the happenings of the last four hours, so that our strained
relations did not matter. And that these relations should not suffer
further straining, Captain Merwin, seeing me hopeless, decreed that the
mate's log desk be placed in the passage between our rooms, so that I
could enter up the log slate at the end of my watch without trespassing
upon his atmosphere.

As for Mabel, she had partaken of my blindness; she did not see me,
even when she looked at me. But this gave me a larger opportunity to
look at her, a dismal pleasure which I enjoyed to the utmost.

I cannot describe in detail the peculiar grace, and charm, and beauty
with which this girl appealed to me. All men know, and all men at some
time in their lives invest some one woman with such attributes, which,
perhaps, others cannot see. As a child, with yellow hair and sea-blue
eyes, Mabel Merwin had seemed to me a creature lent from Heaven to
lead me upward; now matured to perfect womanhood, her sea-blue eyes
the same, but her hair darkened to a golden bronze and her creamy
complexion to an orange tint by sun and wind, she was more than ever
one of another world, unable to descend to my own. For mine was a world
of outer and under darkness, of watch and worry, of work and dirt, of
profane, hateful, jealous, and murderous thought which, without knowing
it, I shared with the twin brothers. I could understand the baleful
glitter in their eyes when they looked at the mate; but, uninformed at
the time, nothing of the hungry adoration with which they regarded the
girl.

They were in separate watches, slept in separate forecastles, and did
not meet except in the dog-watches, when the crew--an exceptionally
fine and well-behaved body of men--policed them and kept them from
fighting. In other respects they did well. Poorly educated, yet they
were splendid material from which to develop the hardy, enduring
deep-water sailor, and they advanced rapidly.

Tom was in my watch, and received some tutelage from me; but I am
positive that Bill, in the other watch, got nothing from the mate
but kicks, cuffs, and abuse. Yet he seemed to absorb something from
his own brother; for, side by side, yet without speaking, they
acquired proficiency; until, when each knew the ropes, could box the
compass, steer, and go aloft to a skysail the captain called them aft,
complimented them, and placed them on the articles under pay. Then they
steered a regular trick, and drew clothing from the slop chest--also
sheath knives, which every skipper will deny to a bad crew and accord
to a good; for, worn outside all clothing, they are the handiest tools
aboard ship. Tom and Bill wore theirs as proudly as the ablest seaman
we had. But, with clothing alike, it was harder than ever to tell them
apart.

We were now down off the Cape and had begun the long eastering on the
fortieth parallel. Captain Merwin, as was usual with him when his
officers and crew had settled into place, had retired to his world of
books and study, leaving, except the working out of morning sights, the
navigation, and the handling of the ship, to the mate. Also, it seemed,
he had left to him the welfare of his daughter; for Mr. Butterell
devoted to her all the time he could spare from his work, and would
even remain up in his watch below to talk with her.

As for her, she seemed to enjoy his society, would talk with him by the
hour, watch him with interest as he would stand at the break of the
poop bellowing orders to the men, and respond to his inevitable smirk
with the sweetest of smiles. She gave me never a look, and, as the
captain seldom spoke to me now, and the mate not at all except in the
way of work, my sense of isolation had so grown upon me that I resolved
this passage would be my last with Captain Merwin.

In this rebellious mood I lay smoking in my berth one second dog-watch,
waiting for eight bells and listening to the mate's sallies and Mabel's
laughter through the open window of my room, and to an occasional sharp
word of command to Bill, who, at the wheel, was making hard work of
steering. Though it was southern summer and warm, a half-gale blew
from the starboard quarter, and this, with the following sea, would
have taxed the powers of a better helmsman than Bill. But, instead
of sending such a better man to relieve Bill, Mr. Butterell chose to
heckle the poor greenhorn until, as I could see by ranging the clouds
through my window, the ship was yawing frightfully, two points each
side of her course, and in danger of broaching to or going by the lee.
Some skippers and mates never learn that bad steering is not improved
by criticism, and when eight bells struck I went on deck, angry and
disgusted with the purblind bully.

I found the ship staggering along under an unnecessary and unwise press
of after canvas, the mate still berating Bill, who was desperately
heaving on the wheel, and Mabel seated in a deck chair on the weather,
or starboard, quarter. Following me along the lee alley came the twin
brother Tom to relieve Bill at the wheel; but before allowing him to
take the spokes I steadied the ship myself. Then I relinquished the
spokes to Tom and turned officially to relieve the mate.

But he had other matters on his mind. Collaring Bill before he could
give the course to his brother, he hurled him violently against the
lee quarter rail, then followed and drove him, with kicks and punches,
forward along the alley.

"Now, then, you long-jawed farmer," he shouted to the cowering man,
"up aloft wi' you! Up the lee rigging you go, and over the lee futtock
rigging, to the upper topsail yard, and out the lee yardarm! Hear me?
The lee upper topsail yardarm, where you keep a lookout till four
bells."

"Yes, sir," answered Bill in a curious throaty voice as he scrambled
into the rigging.

"And when the bells strike, you answer them, d'you hear? You sing out,
'One bell--all's well! Two bells--all's well!' and so on. Hear?"

"I hear," snarled Bill, "and by Gawd I'll have your life for this!"

Mr. Butterell's life for a second time had been threatened on board
that ship, and there was an explosiveness in the words, "I'll have your
life for this!" that indicated their sincerity. Then followed a volley
of village billingsgate as Bill made the hard climb on the slackened
rigging, and Mabel rose from her seat; but the mate's answer silenced
Bill, and she resumed it.

"Here!" he said, picking up Bill's knife, which had evidently jolted
out of its sheath in the fracas. "This is what you want? I'll put it
right here, on the house over my window. You can knife me when I'm
asleep, and save your friend the trouble." Then he placed the knife
carefully within the covering board of the house, and came aft with his
smirk, strongly visible in the moonlight.

I was standing beside Tom watching his steering--for he was getting as
nervous over it as his brother--and directly in front of Mabel's chair.
But I was not yet in charge of the deck.

"Mr. Butterell," said the girl calmly as he approached, "I must ask you
not to arouse the men to such language as I have just been compelled to
listen to. I am not accustomed to it."

The smirk left his face and it took on a scowl as he realized my
presence. "Why, Miss Merwin," he stammered. "I didn't suppose--"

"That is all, Mr. Butterell!" she interrupted. "I do not care to argue."

"Course due east," he growled, turning to me.

"Due east, sir," I answered.

"And keep that mutt aloft till four bells. If he fails to answer the
bells, keep him aloft the whole watch."

"Is that all, sir? Is the watch relieved?"

"Watch is relieved, all right. No need o' mustering and counting this
moonlight night. You have the deck now. Watch out!"

"Yes, sir," I answered; then, stepping into the weather alley, I
sent my voice forward, "Weather main- and cro'-jack clew-garnets and
buntlines," I shouted, "and come aft here, some o' you, and take in
this spanker!"

"What are you taking in the spanker for?" asked the mate as I resumed
my position beside Tom, ready to aid him if necessary.

"Do you want charge of the deck again, sir?" I answered. "It's one
man's job."

"Leave the spanker on her. Haul up your clews, if you like," he said.
Then he began a short pacing back and forth before the wheel, evidently
working himself into a rage that was based on the girl's rebuff. He
continued this pacing until the men, under the boatswain of the watch,
had hauled up the weather clews, which allowed the wind to impinge
upon the foresail. Then, seeing that Tom made easier work of the
steering--even though, because of the spanker, he steered with the
wheel nearly hard up--Mr. Butterell was ready for an explosion.

"You look out, young fellow!" he said, halting me as I moved toward the
weather alley. "I'll take the conceit out o' you yet!"

I looked him squarely in the eyes. I do not know that Mabel's rebuke
had heartened me. I only remembered that I had lost her regard, that I
had lost my skipper's good will, and that the last five years of work
and effort, as far as advancement was concerned, had been wasted.

"Take care, sir," I said, quietly, "and do not forget the conditions
under which I have allowed you to live this long!"

Then, in a cold rage, I turned my back on him and took my place at the
forward end of the alley, where I could stand my watch in touch with
both ends of the ship. He did not follow, and soon I heard him talking
amicably with Mabel.

I did not look aft, as I could gauge Tom's steering by the swing of the
fore yard against the few stars showing in the strong moonlight, and I
noticed that the men forward were seeking sheltered and shady spots to
doze away the watch--as is always permitted in easy ships--and that the
lookout on the forecastle deck was pacing back and forth, wide awake.
All was well with the ship, and with me, except for the irritating
conversation on the quarter.

The talk continued until three bells had struck--and with each
striking of the bell Bill aloft had obediently answered--then the mate
shouldered his way past me and went to his room, leaving the girl still
seated in the chair. I did not go aft again until nearly four bells,
when I went to take the reading of the patent log at the taffrail. As
I passed the girl she half rose, as though to speak to me; then, as I
moved sullenly on, sank back in her chair. A glance into the binnacle
showed me the ship on her course, and a glance at Tom showed him with
his left shoulder braced against a spoke, steering by easing the wheel
down and painfully heaving it up. I looked aloft at the swelling
canvas, noticed that Bill sprawled over the lee upper topsail yard,
and saw that nothing could be done in the way of bracing the yards.
The spanker should have come in; for, with the ship griping like this,
she would have broached to in ten seconds if Tom lost his grip on the
wheel. But the mate had forbidden it, and I let it stand.

I took the reading of the log, and again passed stiffly before Mabel,
going forward again by the weather alley, down the steps, and into the
companionway to the desk in the passage, where I jotted down on the log
slate the happenings of the watch. I could hear Mr. Butterell snoring
heavily in his room on the lee, or port, side, and, wondering at his
utterly nerveless makeup in being able to go to sleep so readily after
a fit of anger, I closed the slate and turned toward the door.

At this moment a hoarse, guttural, hair-raising scream rang out,
followed instantly by another in a higher key, and I sprang out,
looking wildly about me for the cause. Mabel lay prone on the deck at
the foot of the lee steps and I reached her at a bound. There was no
blood nor marks, nothing to show what had hurt her and caused her to
scream, and I stood up, bewildered. The men forward had wakened, and
some were coming aft haltingly. I called to them, to question them,
when out of the companion door burst the captain in his pajamas.

"What's happened?" he asked excitedly. "My girl screamed! What is it?"

"I do not know, sir," I answered. "I heard her scream from the log
desk, and found her here."

He examined the unconscious girl, then said, "She has only fainted, I
think. Call the mate and the steward. We must get her below."

For the first time since Mr. Butterell had joined the ship I opened the
door of his room and looked in. He lay face up in his berth beneath the
open window, with the handle of a sheath knife sticking up from his
chest. It had been driven home, and as I looked, horror-stricken at
the sight, four bells struck at the wheel, and Bill's voice came from
aloft, "Four bells, and all's well!"

Twenty minutes later I was locked in my room, charged by the excited
Captain Merwin with murdering the mate. "Find the motive; find the
man!" he had stormed. He had heard me threaten again through his window
as he was undressing for bed, and nothing that I could say as to
another man's threatening, too, had the slightest effect. His daughter
had evidently seen, and had fainted from the shock. When she recovered
she would, no doubt, so testify.

With the boatswain standing my watch, I sat there until midnight; then,
as the other boatswain relieved him, I crawled into my berth, but not
to sleep. The problem would not permit it; for it was a problem that
would not solve. But, in my casting about for a solution, I was forced
to exonerate Bill, the only man besides myself with the "motive." For
how could Bill, whom I had seen on the yard just before going below,
descend to the lee alley, knife the mate through the window, and get
aloft in time to answer at four bells?

Mentally counting my steps along the alley and down to the passage,
the half-minute or so while I was engaged at the log slate, and the
succeeding interval of time between his death scream and Bill's call
from aloft, I found it incredible. Even had he been able so to time his
descent by any means as to reach the window before I had closed the
log slate, still the men had wakened at the scream, and one or more
would have seen him before he could have got out of sight behind the
cro'-jack on his way aloft. As for Tom, who also had a motive, though
a lesser one, he was out of the question. There were no beckets nor
lanyards with which to secure the wheel, and had he dropped it the
canvas would have been in ribbons before he could reach the window.
The steward, who slept off the forward cabin, had come out, rubbing
his eyes, palpably stupid from recent sleep; and he had no motive--the
mate had liked him. When I had sprung on deck the strong moonlight had
shown it clear of men as far forward as the main hatch, from which a
few were arousing themselves. The murderer could not have run forward.

Who else? I asked myself. Mabel? She could have run forward by the lee
alley after I had gone down by the other; but why? She had no motive
for the crime, and if she had why would she have chosen such a moment,
when discovery was inevitable? Then, too, it required strength beyond
hers to drive a sheath knife to the handle into the body of a man.
No, Mabel was also out of the question; but there came to my mind the
equally disquieting query, What was she doing on the main deck, or in
the alley near the mate's room, at that time of night? This I could not
answer; but at daylight it was answered for me.

Captain Merwin opened the door of my room, and I rolled out of my
berth. "Mr. Rogers," he said, "I owe you an apology. You did not kill
the mate. She has recovered and explained."

"Who did, sir?" I asked.

"One of the twin stowaways, she does not know which. I have ironed them
both in the 'tween deck; but they accuse each other."

"Brotherly love with a vengeance!" I commented. "But I cannot see how
either could have done it."

"My daughter saw one of them at the window. Here she is."

Mabel, her glorious hair disheveled, her face pale and drawn, her eyes
tear stained, pushed into the room, and incontinently fell into my
arms, her own around my neck.

"Oh, it's over!" she said brokenly. "It's over at last--and the strain,
and the worry! I could not have stood it much longer! I knew last night
that I couldn't; but you wouldn't let me speak!"

"Mabel, Mabel!" said her father. "Steady yourself, my girl!"

"Papa, go away!" she said. "I want to talk with Mr. Rogers, and you
could not understand--you haven't understood, at all."

He paused a moment; but she straightened herself before him and pointed
to the door. He left us together.

"And you did not understand, either," she said, turning to me. "You
thought I enjoyed his conversation, and his society, and his maddening
attentions. Why couldn't you see? It was only to quiet him, to flatter
his insufferable vanity, and keep him from further assault upon you. I
knew--I knew by your face that first day out that you would kill him if
he struck you again; and then--then the consequences! You had warned
him, threatened, and nothing would have saved you. They would have
hanged you--and what should I have done then?"

"And you did this for me, Mabel? Do you really care for me?"

"Since I first saw you," she said, her face flaming with color. "I
should not tell you now," she added, "only for what has happened; for I
heard your opinion of me that same evening."

"Then you also heard, Mabel," I said, as I took her again in my arms,
"that I have loved you, and waited for you, since you were a child."

"Yes," she answered simply. "Perhaps, after all, that is why I am
telling you now. I might have told you last night, and followed you
down to the main deck; but when I looked in you were busy, and I went
to the lee steps to go back and wait for you. Then I saw him at the
window, and--and I heard--and screamed. I must have fainted, and when I
wakened a little while ago Papa told me you had killed him--and I knew
better."

"God love you, Mabel!" I said. "But what roused you last night--to tell
me--to follow me?"

"What he threatened after you had warned him again. He purposed to
strike you again on the first pretext, and allow you to attempt his
life; then to have you imprisoned for murderous assault. He did not
believe you would actually kill him; but I knew you would. I wanted to
beg you not to try, to be patient, to hold your temper."

"Had you asked me that, Mabel," I said, "I think I should."

After breakfast that morning the body of the mate was given sea burial;
then there followed a curious court of inquiry at the mizzen hatch--a
court in which the two accused prisoners were also witnesses against
each other, and in which the testimony of the only positive witness
was invalidated by lack of identification. Mabel could only say that
she had seen one of them draw his head and shoulders out of the mate's
window just as his agonized scream had smitten her ears, and look into
her face as she peered at him from the head of the steps. But she could
not tell one from the other. The men had heard the screams; but had
seen nothing but myself, bending over the girl.

Bill's testimony was direct and short. He did not change it, nor
attempt to qualify it. The sheath knife was his, he admitted, and it
had not been touched by him. On the yard he had seen me go forward and
into the companion; he had seen the girl follow, peer in at me, and go
to the lee steps; and he had seen Tom leave the wheel when the girl had
entered the alley, hurry along the lee alley, pick up the knife, reach
into the window, and leave it there. He had heard the two screams, had
seen me emerge and bend over the girl after she had fallen down the
steps, had seen the captain arrive, and when four bells had struck he
had answered and come down; for his punishment had ended.

Tom had more to say. First, he had seen Bill drop from the bight of a
lee cro'-jack buntline to the house just where the knife was placed.
He had seen him pick up the knife, jump to the alley, and after the
mate had screamed spring back to the house and disappear behind the
cro'-jack as he climbed the buntline. He had watched him farther aloft
as he appeared on the cro'-jack yard, and had seen him go up the lee
topmast rigging to the upper yard from which, when he had struck four
bells, he had answered.

"You inhuman pair of scoundrels!" spluttered Captain Merwin
indignantly. "No matter which is guilty--for a twin brother to swear
away the life of the other! It is incredible, unheard of! Why didn't
you speak at once--either of you--both of you?"

To this they each coolly announced a satisfaction with the death of the
mate and a disinterestedness in the fate of the other as to minimize
their responsibility.

I now further clouded the case by my own speculations; that Tom could
not have left the wheel without the ship's broaching to, and that Bill
had not the time in which to descend and return, even had he been able
to choose the exact moment. But to this Tom gave immediate answer.

"Can you remember the time it took, sir," he asked me, "from your
lookin' at him aloft to your hearin' him sing out at four bells?"

"About four minutes," I said, after a moment's thought.

"Now, I'll prove it, sir, that it was plenty of time. I s'pose the lee
buntlines haven't been touched since then, have they?"

The boatswains testified that they had not, and Tom requested that
his irons be removed for his demonstration. He was freed, and stepped
toward the weather alley. "Now, I'll go aloft, Mr. Rogers," he said,
"to the same place on the yard as he was, and you take the same place
on the quarter where you was when you seed him up there. Then you start
forward, just as you did, and I'll do just what he did."

The captain nodded assent to this, and I went aft to the log while Tom
danced aloft to the lee topsail yard. "All ready, sir!" he called.
"Start now!"

I faithfully reproduced my steps along the alley, down to the main
deck, and into the passage, where I killed time at the log desk. As I
turned to leave it I heard Tom call, "Now it is, sir!" from the mate's
window, and, stepping out on deck, I went through the pantomime of
leaning over Mabel, talking with the captain, and going to the mate's
room to call him. Before I had reached the door, however, Tom's voice
came from aloft. "Four bells!" he shouted. "All's well!"

I came out. The captain was holding his watch, and Tom was leisurely
descending.

"You were slightly mistaken, Mr. Rogers," said the captain. "He did
it in less than three minutes. He slid down the middle buntlines of
the treesails, took time enough at the window, and went up hand over
hand forward of the cro'-jack, then up the topmast rigging. He has
proved his innocence by proving his brother guilty. But--God help such
brothers!"

"And Gawd help you, you old fool," yelled Bill, as he waved his
manacled hands at the skipper, "if I get out o' this fix! I didn't kill
him, though I meant to, and I'll kill you yet as sure as I meant to
kill him!"

"Down below with him, Mr. Rogers!" said the captain, and I took the
frenzied Bill to the 'tween deck, where I lashed him to a stanchion,
still raving and threatening, not only the captain, but his brother Tom
and myself.

"For it's you," he raved, "that give him a chance to show off his
climbin'! What if there was time? D'ye think I'd ha' been fool enough,
up aloft where I could see, to come down on that job with the girl
puttin' herself in the way? He was on the poop, and couldn't see where
she was."

Though I made him no answer, I confess that this aspect of the case
troubled me as we sailed on toward Sydney. I said no more about it,
though at the trial of Bill at Sydney I introduced it in my testimony.
It had little weight. A captain's preconceived opinion of a sailor's
guilt often has more influence in court than solid evidence to the
contrary, and Bill was convicted of murder in the first degree on the
testimony of his brother and the captain's story of the climb.

We went to sea before he was sentenced; I as first mate, and Mabel as
my promised wife. And, though the rest of the crew had deserted the
murder ship, Tom went with us; for he wanted, he said, to get as far
away from his brother, dead or alive, as was possible. And with his
brother in limbo Tom was really a changed character, lively, anxious to
please, and ambitious to learn. He seemed grateful to me, and accorded
me his confidence, showing me his sheath knife one day with its point
broken off.

"For I want no murder in mine, sir!" he said. "I know I've got a bad
temper, and I know these knives can go deep. No hangman's knots for me,
Mr. Rogers! Say, sir, will you show me how to make one?"

Not without repugnance did I make the grisly exhibit for him in the end
of a rope. He practiced it until proficient, and then, gleefully and
grinning, made hangman's nooses in ropes' ends until the men, with the
suasion of the forecastle, changed his mood.

The change seemed permanent. His unpleasant grin gave way to the old
and equally unpleasant scowl and nervous manner. He grew irritable,
and one morning was so offensively familiar with Mabel and so insolent
to Captain Merwin and myself that I ordered him aloft in his watch
below for punishment, giving him as a task the making up of gaskets on
the mizzen. Then I paid him no attention until four bells, when the
helmsman, looking aloft as he struck the bell, sang out, "Great God,
sir! Look!"

Tom, neatly noosed with a hangman's knot under his ear, was swaying at
the end of an upper mizzentopsail yard gasket which depended from the
place on the yard where his brother had clung the night of the murder.

I had begun to dread the sound of "four bells." This division of the
watch is at two, six, and ten o'clock, night or day. At six in the
evening I had threatened the life of the mate; at ten in the evening he
had been killed; and at ten in the morning Tom had hanged himself.

What fatal or momentous event was to happen some day or night at two
o'clock, I could not imagine; but an incident that occurred near the
end of the homeward run led me to hope that the account had been
settled. We were holystoning the decks, and a man working his stone
near the wheel one afternoon found an obstruction in the deck, which he
pried out and handed to me.

It was a small, flat, triangular piece of steel, sharpened on one edge,
the end of a sheath-knife blade. It had been driven or pressed into the
deck by some powerful force, then broken off, exactly as though used as
a brace between a spoke and the deck to hold the wheel steady while the
helmsman left it for a moment or two. As I came to this conclusion the
man at the wheel struck four bells, and I tossed it overboard.

I said nothing about it to the captain or to Mabel; but news from
Sydney that had beaten us by steamer to New York could not be
concealed. On that day, at ten in the morning, Sydney time, his brother
Bill had been hanged in the jail yard.




                                KISMET


Two babies in cabs pushed by their mothers met in a park. While the
mothers talked the babies eyed each other for a few moments, then set
up a blended scream of such volume and intensity as to break up the
conversation and separate the party.

Five years later they met again in a kindergarten, and the pair, not
knowing each other's names, but animated by a soul hatred coeval with
the beginning of emotion, tried to stare each other out of countenance.
Failing in this, they made faces, earnestly and spitefully, until
reproved by the teacher and separated. One was soon taken away, its
parents having removed their residence.

At eleven years of age they again faced one another, two vigorous boys
from different streets of the city, each a leader of his band. There
had been a "gang fight," a battle with sticks and stones, with charges
and countercharges, retreats and routs. There had been a challenge
from one leader, accepted by the other. They stood for a moment, each
backed by his following; then one reached down for a chip, which he
placed on his shoulder. All boyhood knows the consequences of knocking
off a chip; but this one was not knocked off. The other boy also
reached for a chip and placed it on his shoulder. And so they stood,
silent, scowling, each waiting for a move on the part of the other,
each dominated by a hate and a fear that he could not measure by any
experience, but which surpassed in strength and grip all other emotions
he had known.

"Soak him, Jonesy! Knock it off!" "Don't take that from any man,
Smithy! Hit him!" "What's the matter with you?" "Paste him!" came from
the combined following; but neither made a move. Slowly, like two
tomcats similarly placed, with baleful, glittering eyes, they backed
away until surrounded by their followers. Then came cries of derision
and contempt, ending in a vigorous onslaught by both leaders, in which
several critics bit the dust, and which partly restored their prestige.
But it took many days of such tutelage before the discredited leaders
regained their influence over the weaker spirits and impressed upon
them the fact that they were not afraid to fight. Their excuses and
explanations were many, but bore no relation to the real cause of the
delinquency.

There were no more gang fights, to the relief of the residents and
the police, and the enemies tried to avoid meeting; but when it was
unavoidable they passed with quick, defiant, and sullen glances into
each other's eyes. Once an involuntary raising of a hand by one was
construed into a menace by the other, but he got no farther than to
duplicate the gesture. Some intangible power seemed to paralyze his
tongue and his muscles. Yet neither boy was a coward in the ordinary
sense, nor lacking in the qualities of generosity and forgiveness.
Young Smith, while bathing with other boys in the East River at
Eighty-sixth Street, swam out into the swift current after a drowning
lad, larger than himself, and who had lately bullied him on land,
and, by diving again and again, secured him, only to find himself too
exhausted to bring him in. A passing tug rescued them, the bully
unconscious and Smith at his last gasp. The newspapers made him a hero,
and the grateful bully, knowing Smith's enemy, offered to thrash him;
but the same paralyzing inhibition prevented Smith from sanctioning
this.

Jones, employed as elevator boy in a high building, emulated the feat
a little later. Cool, and steady of nerve, he ran his car up and down
through the smoke of a fire that gutted the building, and brought down
to safety a half-hundred people, being rescued himself on the last
trip, suffocating on the floor of his car. He, too, was made a hero,
but bore his honors as modestly as Smith.

These experiences seemed to have a marked effect upon their future
development. The qualities of courage, endurance, and masculine
virility seemed of more importance than the intellectual and moral
attributes. Jones declined a clerical position in the office of the
skyscraper; and Smith, who could have been educated at college by the
father of the bully, chose to ship in the navy as seaman apprentice.
Shortly after, young Jones, unaware of Smith's step, yet influenced by
the fate that was guiding their paths in parallel lines, joined the
schoolship _St. Mary_, and on graduation entered the merchant marine as
able seaman, with a scholar's knowledge of navigation. Smith served his
time as apprentice, was honorably discharged as petty officer; and as
to reach this rating he must master the study of navigation, he faced
the world at twenty-one as well equipped in this as was Jones; then, as
under the existing laws he could never obtain a commission in the navy,
he chose a field where his knowledge was of use. About the same time
as Jones he, too, shipped before the mast, and the Seven Seas engulfed
them. But each learned of the other through letters from home.

Life in deep-water ships is a school of evolution in which the law
of the survival of the fittest has full play. Weaklings, mental or
physical, die on the first voyage, or quit at the end of it. Soft men
become hard men; hard men become iron men; iron men lose their human
attributes. As the stronger virtues of nerve, pluck, and stamina
increase, so do the softer qualities of mercy and kindness decline.
Both young men were starved and ill-treated before the mast, until,
accepting it as the law of the calling, they fought against it to the
after end of the ship, then to enforce it against the weaker spirits
they had distanced. Each in time became a competent second mate with a
growing sense of his importance; then a first mate, with a fixed and
accepted reputation for "buckoism" that reached across the thousand
miles of sea to the other. Smith, drinking in a saloon at Callao, heard
of Black Jones's feat in quelling the _Eldorado_ mutiny with a belaying
pin and cursed him mentally in furious envy. Jones, blackguarding a man
he had just ironed in the 'tween deck at sea, heard from the victim of
a man who could take him down--Bully Smith, who sailed out of New York.

Smith drank deeper from the news of Jones, and went to sea further
committed to the blind worship of force. Jones insanely struck the man
in irons, and in a week had ironed three others whom he had goaded
into mutinous resentment of his abuse. Two strong, positive souls at
the opposite ends of the earth, united by the first and lowest of
primordial emotions--hatred and fear--were reinforcing each other to
their mutual undoing. Had the kindergarten teacher done her duty and
brought them together in childhood, or had they fought it out as boys,
this might have been averted. Yet there came another chance in middle
life.

The fate which gripped them sent one east from San Francisco, and the
other west from New York, and the two ships sighted each other at the
crossing point of voyages. Here a vicious, biting cold south-westerly
gale blew the vessels against the rocky shores of Cape Horn, and in
the furious turmoil of surf, backed by mountainous antarctic seas that
picked both ships to pieces, but two men reached the shore alive--two
strong, hardy, and enduring mates, Smith and Jones. Bruised and
bleeding, drenched, freezing, and exhausted they painfully climbed the
rocks five miles apart, and struck inland over a hummocky plateau,
walking fast to keep out the cold while the moisture in their clothing
stiffened to ice, not knowing where they were going, but dimly hoping
for aid from the savages.

Through snow and sleet and raging polar wind they staggered on, making
for the cañonlike aperture in the hills to the north that showed
faintly in the lulls of the storm. Famished for want of food, tortured
with thirst that snow would not relieve, racked in every bone and
muscle with the awful pain of extreme fatigue, and not daring to halt
for fear of the drowsiness that fought the fatigue and presaged death,
with the name of God often on their lips--but not in prayer--they
degenerated in two nights and a day into a couple of unreasoning wild
beasts; but not yet insane, for they remembered one another when they
rounded a huge pinnacle of rock at the head of the cañon and met face
to face.

Two six-foot, bearded, ragged, and disheveled human brutes faced each
other a hundred miles from their kind. And instead of their common
suffering uniting them, their common soul mutually repelled them. But
instead of silently and scowlingly backing away like the tomcats of
boyhood, they snarled and growled incoherently like two rival polar
bears, then turned and walked apart, each with what dignity he could
assume under the circumstances. They did not enter the cañon; Smith
turned east, Jones west, and their further suffering has no place in
this story. They were on Hermite Island, and in time, with the help
of sealers, Smith reached the Falklands, where he shipped before the
mast for Liverpool; and Jones, Punta Arenas, where he got passage for
Valparaiso.

It is easy for believers in reincarnation to picture the history of
this warfare of soul. Back in the beginning of things two monera
collide, and, neither able to absorb the other, separate and remember.
Two ameboid organisms struggle for the mastery and rend each other to
death. Two monster fish battle in the warm, steaming sea, and swim
away, wounded, to be devoured by their kind. Two huge reptiles war to
the death. Two mammals fight and run. Two manlike apes grapple on the
bough of a tree, and, locked in vicious embrace, with teeth buried in
each other's flesh, fall to a common death on the ground. Two apelike
men battle with clubs and crack each other's skull. Two human beings
duel with sword or pistol and kill each other. Two babies meet in a
park and squall. And never, from the beginning, victory for one or
forgiveness from either.

Fate gave them another meeting and another chance. Four years later
both were paid off at San Francisco, and in looking for berths each
met a skipper looking for mates, but at different times. Smith met
him first, and, his credentials being good, while his reputation was
world-wide and splendid, from a skipper's viewpoint, he was gladly
accepted as first officer and sent aboard the ship, lying at anchor
in the bay. Jones, rather than wait indefinitely for a berth as first
mate, shipped as second, but only after a delay that brought him
aboard as the ship was lifting her anchor. Neither knew of the other's
presence in port, and their meeting on the poop as the tug was towing
the ship to the Golden Gate was a matter of speculation to Captain
Brown for some days after. They were introduced by the polite and
enthusiastic skipper, who congratulated himself at the moment on his
getting two such stars into his ship as Bully Smith and Black Jones of
New York--and they stood stock-still and silent, staring at each other,
while beads of perspiration gathered on their brows; then both wheeled
and walked away, as they had done on the frozen plateau of Cape Horn.
Mr. Smith to the forecastle, where the men, under the boatswains, were
catting and fishing the anchor; Mr. Jones, to his room off the forward
companion-alley. Here he sat on his chest, reviling Smith, his luck,
the skipper who had shipped him, and the God above who had created
him and brought him into contact with Smith and the things concerning
Smith that he could not understand. Why, he asked himself, had he not
thrashed him as a boy, or made friends with him?

Dimly, through this inquiry indexed by his curses, Jones at this moment
had a fleeting glimpse into the scientific basis of the Golden Rule,
ever a fallacy to him. But his past and his present would not permit of
a continuance of the mind process. Here he was, a competent first mate
with a master's certificate, second mate under a first mate, who was
Smith. And at this he listened to a message delivered by the steward
from the captain, that his presence was required on deck.

He went up, nervous as a cat in a strange place. Even though the ship
was on her way and far from the beach, he approached the captain to ask
that he be put ashore. But the captain quietly said, "Report to Mr.
Smith, sir," and Jones walked forward to report, meeting Smith coming
aft from the forecastle.

"Ready for work, sir," stammered Jones. "What do you wish?"

"No--nothing," answered Smith, equally embarrassed. They passed on,
Smith aft to speak to the captain, Jones forward, around the house,
meekly bearing the scrutiny of the men, and back to the main-rigging,
where he stood idly looking aloft for a moment or two; then he coiled
up a rope--a task that ordinarily he would have summoned a man to in a
burst of invective.

Mr. Smith walked up to the captain.

"Anchor's on the rail, sir," he said. "What next, sir?"

"What next?" queried the captain, sharply. "Don't you know? Get both
anchors inboard and stow them for sea. Pass that chain down into the
lockers. Send down the fish-tackle. Get chafing-gear aloft. Stow away
those fenders and clear up the decks. Get to work, Mr. Smith. Keep
those twenty-four rope-haulers busy. They're looking at you now."

"Yes, sir," answered the subdued Mr. Smith; and he went forward among
the men. Mr. Jones found other ropes to coil.

But the ship must be got ready for sea; and after a wearing day
of work, with tentative orders from the two mates, with sarcastic
comment from the captain, and insolent protest from the bewildered
"rope-haulers," this was finally accomplished; and at eight bells in
the evening, with the tug cast off and the towline coiled down to dry,
with canvas set and the course given to the helmsman, Smith and Jones
mustered the men into the waist to choose watches. They picked their
men, one after another, with less interest in the proceedings than
manifested by the men themselves. Then the first mate said, wearily:
"Relieve the wheel and lookout. That'll do the port watch," and went to
his berth demoralized and despondent, sick at heart--in the mind state
of a prize-fighter lately whipped. The second mate walked the deck in
about the same mood, until four bells struck, when, about the time that
Smith fell asleep, he roused up his individuality and proved himself a
competent and masterful second mate. The watch responded slowly to his
call to the main-brace, and he went among them with a belaying pin.

When Smith relieved him at midnight he, too, felt the inhibition until
Jones fell asleep, when his powers revived and his watch learned his
caliber. Neither man knew the cause of the change of mood. As far as
they could analyze their emotions they were nervous, broody, hateful,
revengeful, and cowardly, until some reluctancy or misdoing of the men
roused them to righteous rage. They did not, and could not, know that
this revulsion did not occur until the other was asleep. This brought
about a somewhat amusing condition of affairs a few days out.

An Orkney-Islander of Mr. Jones's watch--an intelligent,
self-respecting man, who was aloft on the mizzen with a
tar-pot--spilled a few drops on the clean white paintwork of the house;
and Mr. Jones, standing beside the window of the sleeping Mr. Smith,
witnessed the careless act, and shouted:

"Come down here, you long-headed billy-goat, and I'll make you smell
hell!"

"Ay, that I will," answered the man, scrambling down in a hurry.

Irreverent forecastle tradition has it that the Orkney Islands are
peopled by the descendants of a shipwrecked Dane and a nanny-goat. This
tradition found its birth and acceptance, no doubt, from the goatlike
characteristics of the heads, faces, and beards of this hardy race of
people. But to apply the epithet goat to an Orkneyman is like saying
Sawney to a Scot or nigger to a man-and-brother. Mr. Jones faced a
raging lunatic; but Mr. Smith had wakened at his shout, was intently
listening in the berth below, and Mr. Jones's efficiency left him. He
backed away from the enraged sailor, then incontinently fled, pelted in
the back by a hard and tarry fist, and occasionally kicked by a heavy
sea-boot. Around the house they went, the man in an unspent fury of
anger, Jones in an agony of fear and humiliation, until, at the second
lap, Mr. Smith appeared at the forward companion, which opened on to
the extension of the poop around which they had raced, with as much
disquiet in his face as was in Jones's.

"You, too," bellowed the man. "Stand still, an' I'll no eat my dinner
till I've licked you baith."

Mr. Smith stood for a moment or two, long enough to receive several
crashing blows in the face, which he only tried to shield with his
open, enfolding hands; then he, too, fled, but to his room, where he
locked himself in.

Mr. Jones had put the house between himself and the enemy, who, having
conquered both mates, now seemed to be looking for the captain; but
when the captain appeared with a revolver he quieted down, and tamely
went in irons. The captain's opinion of his mates must not be given;
and the two mates' experiences with the men before, by individual
action while the other slept, they had regained their ascendancy and
authority, need not be detailed.

The ship was bound for Melbourne, a long passage full of possibilities;
but they ate at separate tables, and after the first day's work seldom
met except at the change of watches, when one would report to the other
the happenings of the watch--the course, speed, direction and changes
of the wind, and the progress of routine work--in a strained tone that
was answered by the other with an equally embarrassed response. When
both were awake their attitude and behavior were such as to merit
the frankly expressed contempt of the skipper. When one was asleep,
the other earned and won the hatred of his own watch, and this, by
forecastle communion, was extended to the other.

There came a spell of bad weather, in which all hands were up
occasionally, and then it was noticeable that both mates would blurt
out the same order to the men at the same time. It only increased the
general strain, and each mate mentally cursed himself and the other for
the contretemps. Next, the men observed that the pet antipathies of
Mr. Smith among them received more or less of the unkind attention of
Mr. Jones, and _vice versa_. A Dutchman, kicked by the first mate in
the morning washing down the deck, for working his broom athwartwise
instead of fore and aft, was knocked down by the second mate in the
dog-watch for passing to windward of him. An Irishman, damned at the
wheel by Jones for bad steering, was set to work in his watch below
by Smith for the small matter of eating his breakfast on deck. Other
resemblances of thought and action occurred, more or less unfortunate,
such as both showing kindness to the sick steward until they met
at his bedside, then ignoring and neglecting him; and Mr. Jones's
untactful appearance with his sextant when Mr. Smith was taking the
sun at midday--an uncalled-for and regrettable piece of assumption on
his part; for a second mate is not shipped to navigate, no matter what
his proficiency. Again, each mate, unknown to the other, stopped the
morning coffee of his watch on the flimsiest pretexts.

This communion of soul, mutually strengthened, became a force which
pervaded the entire ship's company. The captain grew peevish, fretful,
suspicious, and unkind to all. The steward became insolent as he
recovered his health. The men quarreled and divided among themselves,
uniting only in their hatred of the mates. The cook was mobbed for
unprofessional treatment of the forecastle menu, and the carpenter and
sailmaker fought a drawn battle for choice of seats at the second-cabin
table--a matter that the steward might have decided, but would not. And
thus animated, the floating hell sailed slantingly across the Pacific
until hit by the outer fringe of a typhoon near the Society Islands, by
which time the Orkneyman was released.

Mr. Jones had the deck at the beginning of it, and skillfully got the
canvas in down to the maintopgallant sail, when the captain appeared,
and, with a falling barometer in mind, decided to call all hands and
shorten down to lower topsails. This brought the other mate on deck,
and trouble began. The maintopgallantsail and upper mizzentopsail,
however, came in easily, and were stowed before the evil genius of
the mates could get to work. But then--the port watch to the fore,
the starboard to the main--all hands manned the topsail downhauls and
weather-braces, while the two mates slacked away the halyards and
roared officerlike behests. It was a scene of wild confusion. The yards
had been braced for a beam wind; but this wind was hauling aft and
increasing rapidly to a screaming gale, which, bearing hard upon the
fixed ground-swell, raised an ugly cross-sea that occasionally lifted
a ton or two of green water over the rail. Captain Brown, to get his
topsails in the easier, followed the wind as it changed, keeping it
abeam; and, with a poor helmsman at the wheel, stood close beside him
and added his voice to the uproar of whistling wind, pounding seas, the
formless shouts of the four gangs at the downhauls, and the senseless
upbraiding of the mates.

"Don't part those rotten downhauls!" roared the captain. "Watch out up
aloft!" But the mates could not hear distinctly.

"Haul away on your downhauls!" shouted Mr. Jones at the main-rigging,
and "Haul away on your downhauls!" repeated Mr. Smith from forward,
each speech embellished with stock profanity. The yards were down, and
the tackles aloft "two blocks," but the fatuous mates did not see nor
hear.

"Belay your downhauls! Belay all!" yelled the furious skipper at the
wheel. "Man the spilling-lines, and send a man aft who can steer!"

"Haul on your downhauls!" thundered the mutual-minded mates, and the
exasperated men hauled with all their strength. There were six to a
gang, and they could have broken new manila under the circumstances.
The weather downhauls went first, and the wind within the hollow tube
of canvas lifted the yardarms. Then a sea hit the weather quarter,
boarded the ship, and washed the incompetent helmsman to the lee alley,
where he lay quiet for a time. The captain seized the wheel and ground
it up, yelling the while to "send a man aft, to haul away on the
spilling-lines, to shut up that d--d noise at the halyards, and 'tend
to business."

But in spite of his objurgations the mates could not obey. They ran
about the flooded waist of the ship, shouting futile instructions
to the demoralized crew to do this or that--and their orders were
curiously similar, though inapplicable. Then, in spite of the captain's
mighty heavings on the wheel, the ship broached to, spilling the
topsails first, next the courses. The first slatted back against the
masts, then forward against the strain of the bolt-ropes, started rents
here and there, and in three minutes were in rags and shreds, while
the yards, with slackened weather-braces, swung and banged about in a
manner to send the crew from under. They flocked to the break of the
poop, the two mates among them.

"Come aft here to me, you two hell-fired farmers!" bellowed the
captain, and the two came. "D--n your wretched, miserable hearts and
souls, if it wasn't for the law I'd slaughter you both! Look at my
ship! Just look at her, now! Call yourself competent mates? Someone
must have told you that. Take this wheel! Take it, both of you, and
steer! Get this ship dead before the wind and keep her so! You can't
shorten sail, but you can steer, and steer you will, straight and true,
or I'll put you 'fore the mast!"

They gripped the spokes meekly, Smith to starboard, Jones to port, and
with the aid of the shivered mizzentopsail got the ship before it,
and steered--beautifully, with no sign or word from one to assist the
other. Neither took charge, as is usual with two men at the wheel.
Their movements were simultaneous and harmonious, with no conflicting
judgments of pressure or release. They steered as one man with the
strength of two; and Captain Brown glared at them awhile, then, unable
to criticise, went forward among his men to secure his wabbly upper
topsailyards. He tautened the braces; then, as all the downhauls had
parted at or near the splices of the upper blocks, sent the whipped
ends aloft to be rove off and knotted. But the first man up the fore
had hardly reached the futtock rigging, when he sang out: "Land ho!
Land dead ahead! Breakers under the bow, sir! It's a reef--a barrier
reef. Hard a-port, sir, for God's sake!"

"Port your wheel!" yelled the captain from amidships. "Hard over! Port
main-braces, all of you!"

The wheel went over and the men rushed to the braces, but it was too
late. Hardly had the ship's head swung a point before there was a
crash and a jolt that shook every man from his feet; then came another
and heavier crash, and the stern lifted with a sea, swung through an
irregular arc of radius equal to the ship's length, and came down
with another crash that sent the wheel spinning and both helmsmen to
the deck. The foremast went by the board, snapping six feet above the
deck, and carrying with it the main-topgallantmast. It fell across the
reef that had caught the ship, and the royal and topgallant masts and
yards floated in the fairly quiet water of the lagoon within. The stern
lifted again, swung farther in, and came down with a jar that shook
out the main and mizzen topmasts; but these spars disintegrated as
they fell, and landed close aboard or on the reef. Then came a mighty
sea that swept over the dismantled wreck as over a breakwater; and the
two mates, bruised and half stunned--nearly shocked out of their now
limited faculties--were caught just as they stood erect, and carried
with it, high over the rail, high over the barrier reef, and dropped in
the swirling turmoil of yeasty water within it.

The captain had struggled aft to the starboard alley on the poop, and
saw them go. A following sea hit the ship and bore him back in its rush
along the alley. Recovering, he again scrambled aft to where, on the
house just forward of the wheel, hung a small, circular life-buoy to be
thrown by the helmsman in an emergency.

"Stand by!" he called. "Stand by for this life-buoy!" He could see
their two shaggy heads rising out of the froth, each of them apparently
uninjured, and swimming vigorously toward the reef. "Stand by!" he
shouted, encouragingly, and sent the circular ring of cork and canvas
whirling toward them with a round-arm throw. It fell near them, and
both swam toward it, each getting a grip.

The captain ran forward as he could between the sweeping seas to where
his crew clustered under the weather-rail, hanging on to coils of rope
and belaying pins.

"Go out there, some of you!" he shouted. "Go down the foremast and
throw them a line! I'll clear away the running-gear, so you can
overhaul enough. Bear a hand, now, or they can't get back!"

"To hell with them!" said the Orkney-Islander. "Think you, cappen, that
I or any man here would go down that spar after yon two buckos?"

Some there might have gone, for the captain was a naturally humane man
and very much in earnest. But the Orkneyman was a master spirit among
them, and his example prevailed. No one would go. The skipper mounted a
few ratlines of the main-rigging, and shouted to swim to the floating
wreck of the foremast, not far from where they struggled with the
life-buoy--an easy swim had they swum alone. They made no response, nor
did they cease their futile struggles. But they did not struggle with
each other, only with the life-buoy and with the sea. They drifted to
leeward into the lagoon, past the wreckage that might have saved them
both, and by which they could have regained the ship. With only their
heads showing occasionally, for their struggles kept them under, they
went out of sight in the smudge of rain and spindrift, gripping with
all their strength the small life-buoy that would have supported one,
but not two.

Cursed to the last with a fear of each other that matched their hate,
they would not fight, but died as they lived, with their problem
unsolved and their supremacy undetermined.




                         THE MATE OF HIS SOUL


Though he became a man later, he was a child of three when I
first knew him, and I was a youngster of ten. He was fair-haired,
pink-cheeked, and somewhat girlish--that is, a sweet-faced child, who
attracted affection and attention. He had a father, mother, a couple
of aunts--all in the same household, and several devoted cousins and
neighbors, of various ages, who occasionally visited him. I was in the
latter class, and, one day, after running an errand for his mother, I
picked him up, after the manner of my elders, and petted him. He stood
it tranquilly and smilingly, until his eyes rested on a corner of the
room. Then they dilated in terror, and a piercing scream came from his
lips. It was not the ordinary scream of nervous children--it was more.
After the beginning it rose an octave higher, much as a policeman's
whistle will rise from pressure of breath, or a steam siren take a new
note when it is well at work. It was penetrating and harrowing, and
his feminine relatives responded with inquiries and fumbling after
possible pins. Yet the screams continued, while his eyes were fixed in
indescribable intensity on the corner. He saw something there.

"What is it, boy?" I asked. "What do you see?"

"There!" he gasped, pointing. "Don't let it. Don't."

I gave him to his mother, and with the true intuition of a harum-scarum
boy, I ran to the corner, shouting, "Get out of here," at the same time
dealing a furious kick at an imaginary creature.

However, I was not affected at the time. Repeating my injunctions to
get out, I kicked and pursued the imaginary thing out through the door,
and returned, smiling, to the child.

"It's gone," he whimpered. "Don't let it come back."

"But what was it?" they asked. "What did you think you saw, Freddie?"

He did not answer, and I ventured a suggestion: "Ghosts?"

He shook his head. Perhaps he had no formulated speculations of ghosts.

"Goblins?" He still looked doubtful, and I went into detail.

"Horns?" I asked.

He nodded, and shook convulsively.

"Big mouth, with teeth?"

"Yes, and hair--long hair. And dirty, oh, so dirty."

"Did it have hands, or were they all feet?" I asked, enjoying the joke
immensely; for in my babyhood I had felt these fears and seen these
things.

"Claws," he answered, "like the cat, only bigger, and all bluggy--all
bluggy."

"Tell us more, Freddie," I went on. "I couldn't see him very well, in
that dark corner."

"He looked at me," answered Freddie, shivering in his mother's arms,
"and he opened his eyes, until they were all white, and he opened his
mouth, until it was all teeth. And he wanted to bite me. I knew he
wanted to bite me."

"Did he have horns, Freddie?" I persisted.

"Yes--horns on his head, and wings--dirty wings, with claws. But when
you kicked him, he looked at you and wanted to bite you; but you made
him run. He backed out the door. Didn't you see?"

"Oh, see," I answered bravely, though my heart was beating rather fast,
and my tongue somewhat dry against the roof of my mouth. "Don't ever
be afraid while I'm around, Freddie. I'll take care of you."

Then his mother took me by the ear, led me out, and banished me, saying
that if I taught her little boy any such nonsense I must stay away.

That night, in my darkened bedroom, I saw things myself--things with
claws, and horns, and wings, and eyes. But as I had seen them since
my earliest remembrance, and had only drawn upon my experiences in
my suggestions to Freddie, I managed to banish them and go to sleep,
not knowing then that Freddie, my pet playmate, had gathered up these
primordial memories from me, and delivered them back. Later on I
understood.

My banishment was thorough, and enforced to the limit. I saw little of
Freddie through the years of boyhood, only hearing at times that he was
a model boy, an example of good behavior to his fellow schoolmates,
and a reproach to me, a black sheep of a family in which were no ewes
or lambs. My father was a policeman, my two brothers firemen, and my
mother a woman of such soul and character that she could master the
four of us. She thrashed me through high school, but I evaded the
ministry, for which she was preparing me, by running away to sea at the
age of eighteen.

I was a second mate when I met Freddie again. It was when I, with the
first mate of the schooner I belonged to, and two of the crew, were
returning from an evening at the theater, that we passed a group of
young men, smoking cigarettes, and one of the men said:

"Get onto the dudes."

One of them promptly followed, spoke a few sharp, incisive words,
and gave the critic such a thrashing as astonished us all. It was
Freddie, twenty years old, well-dressed and gentlemanly, but with an
aggressiveness that never found warrant in his childhood. When he had
licked the man, I talked with him amicably.

"Oh, yes," he said. "I'm a seafaring man, too, only I went through
Annapolis, and will start on my practice cruise in a week or so. Then
I'll get my commission in the navy."

"You've done well, Fred." I felt moved to drop the "Freddie." "I've put
in seven years, and am only second mate in schooners."

"But you can do better," he answered. "Why, every day of my life I've
thought of you, done the things and said the things that I fancied you
might do or say. I never forgot the time you kicked the monster."

"Oh, when you were a baby?" I answered. "Why, I'd about forgotten that,
myself."

"Shake your crowd," he said, "and I'll shake mine. Come with me, and
talk. I've lots to say."

We talked that evening, to little results. I found Fred vapid,
flippant, and uninteresting. He had spent his childhood and youth at
home, winning prizes at Sunday school and at the dancing academy.
At Annapolis, he had learned boxing and football; but, never in his
life had he struck a blow in anger until this evening, when he had
thrashed an able seaman. He was as surprised at the feat as I was
myself, and asked me if he had done it in the fit and proper manner. I
was disappointed in him, and left him, with a willingness not to meet
him again. And that night I had the frightful dreams of my childhood,
though not then, nor before nor since, have I been a drinking man.

I may as well describe them now, for they appeared again and again
while we lay in port, and bear strongly upon this story. There was the
menacing monster that I had recognized by Fred's childish description,
and the imaginary thing which I had kicked away from him--a creature
of teeth and eyes, of horns, claws, wings, and scales, familiar to all
sensitive children, perhaps, and possibly descended through the ages as
a primordial memory of some prehistoric reptile. But this, terrifying
though it was, did not afflict me greatly; for I was somewhat familiar
with it, and even in my dreams knew that I could escape it by flight,
and in the waking, or half-waking, condition drive it from me by
imagined attack.

It was a new element in these new dreams that made me dread the night
as a time of torment and horror, and finally so worked upon my nerves
that, ascribing it to the influence of my environment, I quit my berth
long before the day of sailing.

This new thing can be described easier than realized. It was
dark, deadly quiet, and inert, formless, except for its three
dimensions--about two feet long, and six inches broad and high, with
neither eyes, feet, wings, teeth, tail, ears, nor even a mouth. Yet it
had power of volition, and was always behind me. It followed me across
miles of open country, through pathless jungles, through long, spacious
halls, sometimes lighted, but always empty.

In one dream I took to an open boat, and pulled frantically to sea,
only to find it at my back when I turned for a sight ahead. Again I
climbed a tree, and saw it resting on the bough behind me.

It was on this account that I changed my berth, shipping before the
mast on a deep-water ship, to get out of that port the more hurriedly.
And as I wakened at seven bells, on the first morning out, and rolled
out for my breakfast, I heard the plaintive voice of my childhood
friend, Fred. He was out on deck, evidently of the other watch; for he
was dressed in the tarry rags of a merchant sailor, and held in his
hand a deck swab, with which he was endeavoring to dry a wet scupper,
while the second mate lashed him with a rope's end.

He shrank under the blows, and tears ran from his eyes; but he had no
sooner spied me, staring in amazement from the forecastle door, than
his attitude changed. Dropping the swab, with fury in his still wet
eyes, and oaths on his lips, he launched himself at his tormentor.
There was a confused tangle of limbs for a few moments, and Fred
emerged the victor.

The second mate, his face somewhat disfigured, limped aft for
assistance, and Fred turned to me.

"God!" he said brokenly. "I'm glad you're here."

"Yes, but what brought _you_ here?" I answered. "Shanghaied?"

"Yes, I suppose so," he chuckled. "Fact is, I went on a dreadful bat
the night I left you. Wonder what the folks at home'll think--and the
commandant at the academy?"

He did not seem to feel his position, and I answered coldly: "Looks as
though your prospects were done for."

Then, along came the first mate, carrying wrist irons, and the skipper,
with a pistol.

"Where's this man killer?" demanded the mate, stalking up to us. Fred
did not flinch; he looked him squarely in the eye. But I, spying
the skipper's gun on a level with my head, stepped back into the
forecastle. Our combined attitude influenced the mate.

"You!" he snarled at me. "Come out of that."

He sprang to the door, the manacles swinging over his head, and before
I could dodge he had laid my cheek open with the blow.

Though I had done my deep-water sailing under American mates--the
harshest in the world--I had never yet, in my whole nine years at sea,
received a blow; and, as second mate in big schooners, I had not found
need to strike one. The pain and the shock of this assault upon my
person and dignity drove out of me every sentiment and attribute of a
civilized man trained to respect authority--all regard for law except
the great first law, and for a few moments I was an animal. And in
those few moments the mate died.

He was a large, strong man, but I was his equal. I do not know just
what part of his body I first closed my hands upon. I only know that
my thick finger nails sank in, wherever I gripped. He seemed no harder
than a ripe melon, and I shifted my hold, while we reeled about, again
and again, until I had him by the throat; then, with all my strength, I
closed my hands until my thumb and finger nails met--somewhere. Then my
limited consciousness went out in a flash of light, ending in darkness;
and, when I came to, I was ironed in the lazaret, my head aching badly,
blood on my face; and Fred, also manacled, sitting opposite, and
looking at me. I could see, even in the half light, that his eyes were
red from weeping.

"What's happened?" I asked, as I painfully sat up, and looked at my
manacles.

"Oh, you're in for it," he answered loftily, yet with a jerky,
hysterical twang to his voice. "You killed the mate, and the captain
thinks I've killed the second mate. He struck you down with an iron
belaying pin, and held me under his gun while the steward put the irons
on us both. Oh, why did you do it? What will become of me?" He began to
cry.

"Shut up, you whimpering ninny!" I growled. "What troubles me just now
is, what kind of a man _are_ you? You can fight, but you cry over it.
If I killed the mate, I expect to swing for it, but I'm not crying."

"But I wouldn't have done it if you hadn't appeared," he quavered. "You
encouraged me."

"What's that? You'll say I encouraged you to drink next, and get
shanghaied!"

"You did. I never drank in my life till I met you, the other night. I
never fought anybody. I never swore. I woke up last night aboard this
ship, but I don't know how I got here. It must have been because you
shipped."

"Yes, and pulled you on board with an invisible rope! Stop that kind of
talk. I want to sleep."

I felt the stupor that comes of extreme physical pain; for, besides the
bruise on my head, caused by the captain's belaying pin, every bone and
joint ached with the exertions I had put forth in my struggle with the
mate. I lay back, but Fred would not be still. He mumbled to himself
and a few words that I caught indicated that he wanted a drink. Opening
my eyes and looking, I beheld him brushing his knees, and squirming to
the length of his tether, as though to get away from something.

"Drive it off, Jim," he choked. "Kick it away. It's afraid of you."

Wondering what was in his mind, yet remembering the incident of his
childhood and my own late nightmares, I struck out with my heels, and
firmly commanded the creature to go. It went, I suppose, for he thanked
me, and subsided; then I lay back, and was almost asleep when he roused
me again, this time with a shriek.

"The thing!" he gasped. "The thing without legs, or arms, or head! Help
me, Jim!"

This was too much for me. Dimly realizing that there was a psychic,
if not moral, sympathy between us, yet unwilling to defy _this_
THING that troubled him, or even to question him, I sang out
to the man at the wheel, whom I could just perceive through a crack
left by the partly opened hatch.

"On deck, there!" I called. "On deck, you at the wheel! Tell the
skipper that this man down here has the jimjams, and needs attention."

He answered me, and then I heard his voice, calling forward. Soon the
captain appeared, dropping down the hatch, and stepping quickly out
of our reach. In spite of his demonstration with the pistol, he was a
kindly faced man of about fifty, slight and stoop-shouldered, a man
that any troubled soul might appeal to.

"What seems to be the matter here?" he asked, looking us over.

"D. T.'s, captain," I answered, pointing to Fred. "He needs a drink,
and then some bromide, or whatever you have for the symptoms."

"But _you_ seem to be all right."

"All but the scalp wound from your belaying pin, captain," I answered.
"It came too late, from what I have heard."

"Yes, you had killed my first mate before I could reach you. I did
not want to shoot. What manner of men are you, who can kill with your
hands? My mate is dead; my second mate unable to speak, scarcely able
to breathe. How did you do it?"

"As for me, captain," I answered, "I did not know I was doing it. He
struck me in my watch below; I wasn't on deck. I never was struck
before in my life, not even as a boy. And when I have been aft, I never
needed to. Of course, I'm sorry if I have killed him."

"You have," he responded mournfully. "We gave him sea burial at noon.
Have you been aft?"

"As second mate in schooners. I am not a good navigator. My friend,
here, my playmate, schoolmate, and townsman, is a graduate of
Annapolis, and if you can get the jimjams out of him he can navigate;
for, captain"--I looked him squarely in the face--"I understand your
predicament."

"I will think," he answered, after a pause. "I will admit this,
now--that you were both sorely provoked, and that I am sorry I shipped
such mates. Like you, I never struck a blow or received one in all my
going to sea. But I want to know how this young man mastered my second
mate." He looked at Fred, still brushing his knees, and staring into
the dark corners. The query was repeated before Fred answered.

"Oh," he said, as he raised his manacled hands, and pressed his fingers
into his throat below the ears. "I did this. I've studied it, and when
I felt his thumbs in my eyes I gave it to him. He will recover speech
and breathing in time."

"Jiu jitsu, captain," I added, in explanation. "I've heard of the
trick. They teach a great many things at Annapolis not down in the
curriculum."

What the captain might have said in response was prevented by Fred's
plea for a drink, and the sad-faced man withdrew, promising to send the
steward.

Fred, tranquilized by a drink of whiskey and a large dose of bromide,
was soon sound asleep; and a few moments later I followed him into
the land of Nod, where I found the clawed monster and the clawless,
headless, eyeless _thing_. I fought the former and fled from the
latter, wakening at last from extremity of terror, with my clothing
drenched with perspiration. Fred was still asleep, and I was satisfied
to leave him so, and remain awake myself. Even then, with my limited
knowledge of psychology, I remembered that I tried to puzzle out this
strange bond of soul between this weakling and myself; but I could not
solve the problem. All that I could formulate was that in my presence
he could fight, and be a man; in my absence, or when unconscious, he
was a sniveling whiner. As for the nightmares that came to me lately
from contact with him, I had suffered from them before he was born.
This was what stopped me; I could not understand this.

After supper, when Fred was awake, and more or less normal, we received
another visit from the captain. He spoke first to me.

"You are a man of force and character," he said, "and of some
education, I can see."

"A high-school graduate, captain, nothing more."

"Are you a navigator, as you say?"

"I can take the sun for latitude, that's all."

"I am sorry. It will not do. I need a mate who can stand watch, command
the men--for I have a hard crowd--and keep the log."

"I can command the men, if you're thinking of me; but I never saw a
log."

"And your friend?"

"A graduate navigator from Annapolis," spoke up Fred. "But I never
commanded men."

"You will do. The laws of insurance demand that the first mate be a
navigator. You two men must stand trial for manslaughter at the next
port. Will you sail to that port as officers of my ship, or do you
prefer to remain in irons?"

We gladly chose the former, and gave our words of honor not to attempt
an escape at the end of the passage. Thus secured, the captain made
me second mate, and Fred first mate, and as he unlocked our irons
promised to give us his sympathy and testimony at the trial. For he had
witnessed the tormenting of Fred by the second mate, and had verified
my protest of noncombativeness.

So Fred, an untried boy of twenty, with only a book-taught knowledge
of navigation and seamanship, assumed the duties of first officer in a
two-thousand-ton, square-rigged ship, in place of a man I had killed;
and I, a schooner second mate, stepped into a like position in this
big square-rigger. In place of the man he had disabled--both of us
prisoners under the law--for the simple reason that among the crew no
others were in any way capable.

I do not say that I assumed my new duties without misgivings at the
future, or that I wholly justified myself _to_ myself in regard to my
killing the mate; but I won the skipper's approval at once; and, as
Fred got the whiskey out of him, slept well in my watch below, seeing
neither monsters nor _things_.

For a few days, Fred was more of a third mate than a first, as the
skipper stood watch with him, until, under his tutelage, Fred had
mastered the merchant-ship rig. Then he proved competent, and the men,
respecting his position, if not him, gave him no trouble.

He and I agreed very well. I was more amused than irritated at his
quarter-deck airs; and a quiet hint from the skipper that I study up
on navigation, with the loan of an "Epitome," a nautical almanac, and
an old log book, gave promise that our positions might some time be
reversed. And, so adjusted, we sailed out into the broad Atlantic.

So far I have said nothing of the weather. As a fact, it blew a gale
from the west or northwest continually from the first day out until we
hit the Gulf Stream, by which time, though fair, the wind forced us to
heave the ship to--that is, to bring her up on the starboard tack under
short sail. We performed the maneuver successfully, and the darkness
had come when the gear was coiled up, and the watch sent below. The
ship took it easily, plunging up and down in the same hole, and taking
very little water on board. But the change from the long, swinging
heave and roll of a ship running free, to the short, jerky lifts and
dives of a ship hove to, was too sudden for the steward in the cabin.
I had the deck, and from my position in the weather alley could hear
the crashing of dishes sent to the floor, and the scraping and bumping
of cabin furniture. Also, I heard a scream, and wondered if Fred had
the jumps again; but before I could even speculate on the matter, the
after companion opened, and the steward appeared, his face twisting
in excitement. He was German, and he stammered; and, while wondering
what he had on his mind, as he endeavored to speak, I noticed a cloud
of smoke floating away to leeward from one of the lee cabin windows. I
sprang aft to the steward, and he found voice.

"Fire!" he said explosively. "Der lamp f-f-fell der t-t-t-table off."

"Call all hands forward there," I sang out. "Bring the deck pump aft,
and bear a hand." Then I tumbled down into the smoke-filled after
cabin, followed by the steward.

"In der s-s-s-storeroom," he stammered.

"Where's the captain?" I asked, as I groped my way through the smoke.

"Der c-c-cappen is fall down by der storeroom," he answered.

A stifled scream came out of the smoke, and a slim figure in a dressing
gown staggered into view, falling helplessly into my arms. It was a
girl, and by the dim light from the swinging lamp above, I saw that she
was young, pale, and sweet of face.

"In God's name, what's this?" I said. "Here, steward, take her on deck;
then come back, and get something warm to cover her."

He took the fainting girl from me, and went up the companion. Then I
sought my way through the choking fumes to the door leading into the
forward cabin, off which was the steward's storeroom. Taking a good
breath of the best air available--near the floor--I plunged through and
stumbled over a prostrate body.

Grabbing it by the collar and stooping low, in case I had to take
a new breath, I dragged it swiftly back through the door and up to
the companion, where the air was somewhat sweeter. I recognized the
captain, and as men were overhead on the poop, waiting for orders,
I had them haul him up, and lead the deck hose into the forward
companion. Then, to get there the more quickly, and thinking of Fred,
possibly suffocating in his room, I took another blind dash into the
forward cabin, and found sweeter air, also more light. And there was
Fred, who had opened the forward door for air, coolly playing the
stream from a fire extinguisher into the blazing storeroom.

"Never mind your hose," he said. "I'll have it out in a jiffy."

But the men were already crowding into the cabin with the hose; and,
directing me to go on deck and watch the ship, he ordered the men to
drag out on deck all half-consumed articles, as fast as they could
handle them. Angry and jealous that this young prig should have proved
himself the man of the hour, I obeyed him, and found the skipper and
the young lady aft near the wheel, both conscious, but weak. I reported
that the fire was out, thanks to the first mate and a fire extinguisher.

"Yes, it was in his room, ready for such an emergency," said the
captain. "Josie, this is the second mate, Mr. Winters; my niece, Mr.
Winters. She has been very seasick, so far, and has not shown herself.
Do you know, Mr. Winters, I have hopes of our first officer. He is
young, but efficient."

"Of course he is, sir," I answered hypocritically. "His education is a
valuable asset."

"Oh, but it was not his education, in this case. Why, he went down in
that stifling smoke, and rescued this little girl, just as she was
fainting away; then he went on into the forward cabin, and hauled me
out to safety. I honor that young man."

"Yes," said the girl. "I saw him, just as my senses were leaving me. He
seemed a demigod, so big, and broad-shouldered, and fearless. I knew I
was safe at that moment."

Before I could speak, Fred appeared, and I backed away. I knew that the
matter was too trifling of itself to make a point of--to assert that
I was the heroic individual that went down into the smoke; yet, when
I looked on and listened, while that apology for a seaman responded
politely to their thanks for saving their lives, I escaped the scene. I
went forward of the house, where I soon met the steward.

"Look here, you animated frankfurter," I said, as I collared him. "Did
you tell the skipper that the mate went down the after companion, and
pulled him out?"

"Sure," he answered earnestly. "You're a mate, ain'dt it?"

"Get out," I rejoined, pushing him from me. "If it wasn't for the
shame of it, I'd hit you. The 'mate' aboard ship is the first mate,
always--not the second, or the third."

"But I will tell him, all right, sir," he said.

"Don't trouble yourself," I responded angrily. "Let the matter drop.
The mate put the fire out, and that's all that's important."

So the matter dropped. It was my watch below from eight to twelve
that night, and I slept well, in spite of my anger and chagrin. It
was my watch on deck from twelve to four, and I stood it in the
tranquil poise of mind that usually comes to men after a sleep. I
forgave the poor, vain weakling, knowing that I was the stronger. But
in my watch below, from four to half-past seven in the morning, I
fought monsters and fled from the horrible _thing_, and awoke weak,
shaken, and nerveless. I had never tasted whiskey in my life, but in
my half-conscious condition there seemed to be the thought that I had
tasted it--a thought which merged into the mental query as to whether
it would not be better to stupefy myself, like drunkards, rather than
endure such torture when asleep and helpless. Then came full awakening,
and a return to my normal self.

As second mates eat at the second table, I went on deck and relieved
Fred. He seemed anxious to avoid direct conversation with me, and after
giving me the course and the happenings of the watch, hurried below.
When he came up, at eight bells, he was more friendly.

"Stunning fine girl," he said. "Just able to make a pretense at
breakfast, but she thinks I'm all right."

I mentally consigned him to the lower regions, and went to my
breakfast; but there was no sign of the young lady.

The wind died away that morning, and I made sail. For the first time
since sailing, the ship wore royals and skysails, sliding along with
a quartering breeze over a sea that was just a little too heavy for
seasick folk. Yet, about eleven, the girl came up, escorted by the
skipper. And as I looked at the pale, pure, clean-cut little face and
big, luminous eyes, I lost what philosophy my last nightmare had left
me. I knew that from that moment this girl was to be everything to me.
And I cursed the mock hero who had stolen my vantage. She went down
soon, and the wind seemed to blow colder.

At seven bells, the sun being in sight, Fred was roused, to take
meridian observations; and, as he stood in a patch of sunlight, I
noticed that he wabbled unsteadily, and that his eyes were sunken and
glassy. But I thought nothing of this until eight bells, when the
skipper informed me that, on overhauling the burned-out storeroom, he
had found a small keg of whiskey missing. As the men had assisted in
putting out the fire, he thought it advisable to have an overhaul of
the two forecastles, as whiskey in bulk was an unwise stimulant for
sailors at sea. So, while he and Fred were at dinner, I searched the
crew's quarters, but found nothing. In fact, remembering those glassy
eyes, I did not expect to. I so reported to the skipper, and when I had
finished my dinner I made a quick, unofficial, yet thorough, inspection
of Fred's room, and found nothing there. But I made no report of this.
He had hidden it.

From this on, Fred's condition was apparent to anyone who cared to
observe. I so cared, but do not think that the skipper did. He talked
with him, counseled him, and tutored him, glad, evidently, to be in a
position to aid so promising a young man.

Fred received it all with sodden gravity, too drunk to question, yet
sober enough to listen. I would have taken him in hand, bullied and
coerced him into giving up that store of whiskey, had I not been
maddened by jealousy and the sight of the girl's eyes, never resting
upon me, but following Fred about the deck, with the adoring gaze of
devotee. He was an exceptionally handsome youngster; and, to her, I
suppose, was a demigod, who had heroically saved her life, while I was
a person to be tolerated because necessary.

"Well," I said, between my teeth, "let him work out his own
salvation--or damnation."

He worked out the latter. In the lower berth in my room, just across
the passage from Fred's, was a living, wheezing, half-alive dead
man--the disabled second mate, whose place I was filling. At first,
he had glared unspeakable hatred at me, but as I had responded with a
few kindly acts born of pity, this look left his eyes, and gave way to
inquiry and interest. He could not speak, and could barely breathe,
but about this time seemed anxious to say something to me. Every day
he tried, and at last, somewhat distressed at his painful efforts, I
advised him to wait until he could talk, and not bother me like this.
So he stopped his efforts, and, as I had not thought to give him paper
and pencil, his message was deferred until too late. But in every watch
below I saw the _thing_.

We soon picked up the trade wind, and under the influence of mild blue
skies, racing white clouds, and warm weather, the young niece of the
captain recovered her health and spirits. There was color in her cheeks
and light in her eyes that bespoke a happy disposition; but she seldom
noticed me--in fact, she spoke to the man at the wheel much oftener,
and I could only grit my teeth, keep my clothing as neat as possible,
and study navigation in my watch below.

As I progressed, I was surprised to find how easy it was, and soon I
felt competent, if need arose, to take chronometer sights, lay out a
traverse, and keep the log.

As for Fred, he steadily grew worse. Not even the influence of that
beautiful little girl could keep him from tapping his secret store; and
soon his condition became such as to attract the skipper's attention.

Fred tumbled down the poop stairs one dog-watch, when all hands were
on deck, and in going forward to execute some task, zigzagged back and
forth.

"Mr. Winters," said the captain to me, "is that young man drunk?"

"I don't know, sir," I answered, resolved not to have a hand in his
undoing.

"My whiskey never was found. Do you think that he has secreted it?"

"Oh, uncle!" said the girl, who had listened. "What are you thinking
of? He is a perfect gentleman; he could not be a drunkard."

The captain still looked at me, waiting for my answer. I was half
resolved to give it truthfully, when a commotion forward forestalled
it. "Git aft where ye b'long, you drunken son of a boardin' master,"
shouted an Irishman of the crew, "an' sind the second mate, if you want
things done shipshape."

He had Fred by the collar, and was marching him ahead at the end of his
extended arm. With a final shove, and a kick, he sent Fred from him,
and went forward.

Fred fell in a heap; then arose, and, with a solemn scowl on his face,
climbed the steps, and joined us at the wheel. The girl looked at him
wonderingly, the skipper disdainfully. Fred's eyes were bleary, and his
walk unsteady; he had assisted his progress aft by leaning on the rail.

"Go down to your room, sir," said the captain sternly, "and remain
there. You are drunk. Get yourself out of sight of my crew."

"Yeth, thir," lisped Fred, stumbling forward along the alley to the
steps, down which he floundered.

"I will stand his watch, Mr. Winters," said the captain to me. "Go
below, if you like, Josie; go down, and forget your interest in that
young wretch. I am disappointed in him, and am through with him."

When I saw the look on the girl's face, I was glad that I had not
denounced him. I have seen that look in the face of a mother at the
coffin of her child.

I went to my room, and saw through Fred's open door that he had climbed
into his berth, and was already asleep. I still had an hour of my
watch below, and to steady my mind got out the "Epitome" and a pad of
paper, to figure out a few problems in navigation. And now my sick
roommate made a sound; his speech was returning, though it was not yet
articulate. Yet he made me understand by his grimaces and gestures that
he wanted the pad of paper. I understood at last, and gave him both pad
and pencil. He wrote, and I read, as follows:

    "On the night of the fire he filled the empty fire extinguisher
    with whiskey from a keg, and has tippled ever since."

I nodded my understanding of his message; and, going over to Fred's
room, lifted the fire extinguisher off its hook, and shook it. It was
empty. I hung it up, and went back.

"He's used it up," I said, to the dumb brute, who, caught foul in a
wrestling trick beyond his comprehension, hated his enemy more than I
did. He smiled and closed his eyes. He felt, no doubt, that his revenge
was nearly due.

I had the deck during the first watch that night, and heard no sounds
from below. No doubt, Fred slept soundly. At midnight, I called the
skipper, and went down. Fred was quiet, and my roommate asleep, so I
turned in, hoping for a few hours of sleep. But it was denied me. I
wakened in an hour, frenzied with fear of the _thing_ that was pursuing
me, and as consciousness came to me I heard Fred's mutterings. Then I
saw him, through the opened doors, rise from his berth, and approach
the empty fire extinguisher. He lifted the empty flask, put the tube
to his lips, then hung it up, and crept into his berth. His mutterings
became words, his words oaths and maledictions, which soon took on the
nature of screams and shrieks. I turned out, and examined him. He was
sitting up, waving his hands toward the fire extinguisher, hanging on
its hook near the door.

"What ails you?" I demanded. "What do you see now?"

"Oh, Jim, Jim!" he gasped. "Drive it away! See it! There on the bed!"

I grasped an imaginary dragon at his feet, and flung it out.

"There, it's gone," I said soothingly. "All right, now?"

His answer was a scream.

"But that--that--_that_!" he choked. "That thing without legs, or eyes,
or mouth. There--there! See it! Take it away!" He was looking at the
fire extinguisher.

It was a cylindrical tube about two feet long and six inches in
diameter. I looked at it, and suddenly there came to my mind the
physical resemblance to the weird and uncanny _thing_ that had
tormented me in my dreams. Not knowing that I was right, yet obeying a
sympathetic impulse, born of my own dream terrors, I took the innocent
cylinder off its hook, and said: "I will throw it overboard, and drown
it. It will never come back."

Then I went on deck, and tossed it over. It must have filled before
long through its rubber tube, and gone to the bottom. Going back, with
a faint hope that I had solved Fred's problem and my own, I found him a
raving maniac, screaming and shouting for whiskey.

By this time, the skipper and his niece were aroused, and they appeared
in the passage between the rooms. Ignoring them for the moment, I
endeavored to soothe the demented creature in his berth. To no avail.
Springing out, with twitching features and convulsive movements of
arms and legs, he upbraided me for throwing overboard the whiskey. I
told him that it was all gone, and that I had simply thrown away the
_thing_. He would not accept. Shrieking his maledictions upon me, he
bounded through the door, reached the deck, and led us in pursuit up
the poop steps to the alley. Along this he raced, gained the taffrail,
and before the surprised man at the wheel could make a move to stop
him, he had sprung overboard.

We backed the mainyards, lowered a boat, and searched for two hours
before giving him up. He had gone to find the demon that had cursed
him--the cylindrical thing of two-feet-and-six-inch dimensions.

       *       *       *       *       *

I am an old man now, old and content in the love and companionship of
a sweet-faced little woman, who, thanks to the testimony of the German
steward, came to me before the end of the passage.

Since the death of Fred, I have never dreamed of monsters and
cylindrical _things_. But in later years I have studied deeply of
psychology and the occult. And these problems remain unsolved. Did I,
who dreamed of monsters before Fred was born, obsess him and drive him
to the drink that killed him?

Or did Fred, after he had begun drinking, obsess me with the dream
vision of the _thing_, which found physical manifestation in an
innocent fire extinguisher in which he kept the whiskey?




                              THE VOICES


The new boy sat, quiet, shy, and abashed, in the seat given him that
morning by the principal. His seat mate was a stranger to him, and,
being well up in front, right under the desk of the principal, there
had been no communication between them. During the morning recess he
had made no friends, standing close against the fence that divided the
boys from the girls, timidly watching the rough games of the others;
and at noon he had run to the new home to which his parents had taken
him, with boyish disapproval of the school and the pupils. But now, at
three o'clock of this Friday afternoon, he was compelled to change his
opinion. The weekly exercises had begun, and, as his last school held
no such entertainment, he was intensely interested.

A girl of sixteen played a very pretty march on the piano, and moderate
applause was permitted. A boy delivered "Bingen on the Rhine," and
received no applause whatever; but the next boy won a little compulsory
approval, led by the principal, for declaiming the Declaration of
Independence. Then followed more recitation, music, and essay reading,
lukewarmly received; but when the principal rose and said, "And last,
we shall have a song by Zenie Malcolm," a suppressed commotion went
through the school, and each boy sat straighter.

The new boy started, and an unknown thrill surged from heart to brain.
He seemed to know that name, but could not recall where he had heard
it. The girl called to sing approached from the rear of the school, and
he was too well versed in school-room etiquette to turn and look; but
when she came into view, crossing the space between the front desks and
the low stage, he rose half out of his seat, his eyes wide open, and
the delicious thrill of recognition again tingling through him. He had
known her; but where, and when? He could not remember, and sat down
under the principal's disapproving frown, staring hard at the girl at
the piano.

She was about his age--eleven--a rather pretty child, with dark blue
eyes, and a wealth of golden hair, confined only by a ribbon, and
hanging loosely down her back. And she sang, in a sweet, trembling
voice, a lullaby the music of which the boy seemed to know--that is, he
anticipated the coming notes of the tune before they left her lips--but
he could not recall where or when he had heard it. She went to her seat
at the end of it, applauded by the whole school, and unaware of the
silent worship of the new boy. All his life he had imagined the angels
as having hair of this hue; but he had never seen it on a human being.
Dark blue eyes he was familiar with; his mother had them--and the
angels, too.

That night he hummed the tune to his mother; but she had never heard
it, and with motherly intuition advised him not to think of girls at
his age, and to attend to his studies. The boy racked his brains for
a few days, trying to remember where he had seen this girl and heard
this song, then gave it up. Later, with a larger acquaintance among
the pupils, he learned that her parents had moved from a neighboring
town only a month prior to his advent in the school. Coincidence was a
large word to him at his age, and meant nothing; so he remembered his
emotions at first seeing her.

But the strenuous life of a healthy schoolboy is such as to preclude
investigation of mental phenomena. He made friends and joined the
games of the others. From being shy and embarrassed, he grew to be
confident and plucky. He had his fights and won his victories; but
never at a time when his small goddess could witness--she was always
somewhere else, and other girls applauded his prowess. But she must
have learned from these other girls; nothing else could explain the
shy little smile she gave him as he came into school one day, both
eyes blackened and his coat torn almost in half. She had never even
looked him in the eyes before, and he went forward at the stern call
of the principal with a glorified joy in his soul that carried him
triumphantly through the pain of his punishment.

With his enterprise in playground friction came an enterprise in study.
He easily distanced the rest, winning prizes and standing near the head
in all classes. With his advancement came a change of seat, and he
found himself near her; in a position where, by a slight turning of his
head, he could catch a glimpse of the pure, clean-cut little face in
its gold-hued framing. But she never returned these glances. He never
dared hope that she would; so he never tried to make her acquaintance.

After school he would follow her, at a distance of half a block, until
she entered her gateway, and then return to the boys. She lived in
a large, well appointed house among others equally well appointed,
and, satisfied that her parents were very wealthy, he gave her the
additional prestige that riches always carry in the minds of children.
He worshiped her more while actually seeking her less. Yet he could
not bear too long an absence from her vicinity. He would play truant
occasionally, with other boys; but invariably he would be dragged by a
longing and a hunger to be near her that was irresistible; and against
the derision of his fellows--which he would silence when he met them
again--he would shamefacedly sneak into school, bear his punishment for
being tardy, and cheerfully make up his studies, satisfied with the one
glimpse he could get as he passed her on the way to his seat.

There came a severe winter and an epidemic of sickness among the
children of the town; but this school escaped except for these two.
She was first to succumb, and for two weeks her place was vacant--two
weeks of utter wretchedness and misery for the boy, during which he
could not study, nor recite, nor even remember on call the lessons he
had learned. He could feel and suffer to the utmost; but, unformed,
untrained, unschooled in tact, diplomacy, or any of the amenities of
adult life, he could not even arouse himself to ask of her, or to take
his mother into his confidence and obtain the relief of knowing the
worst. It was not that his emotions took the form of anxiety so much
as they crystallized into a sense of loss--a sense of something taken
from him, that he could neither find nor name. One morning he saw her
in her seat, pale and wan and thin, and the sense of loss left him.
He was content now that she was near him, and fretted no more, even
suppressing a curiosity as to the nature of her sickness.

Then came his turn; two weeks in bed, fevered and delirious at times,
thinking of her in lucid moments, talking of her to a puzzled mother
when the delirium gripped him, and surviving at last through careful
nursing, to return to his seat in school as pale and thin as was the
girl. One glance he took, and his content came back. She paid him
no attention, not even joining the others in the friendly looks of
welcome he received, and he took up his studies at the foot of all the
classes--with his divinity just above him.

"It is rather funny," commented one class teacher, with a smile,
"that the two best scholars are at the foot. Johnny Bridge went behind
when Zenie Malcolm was sick, and Zenie Malcolm went behind when Johnny
Bridge was sick. You two must study and catch up."

He felt a curious elation, but did not look at her; so he did not
notice that her cheeks were flaming red.

And now there came to him a real, or at least a tangible, sense of
loss. A small sister, his pet, whose dolls he had mended and whose
tears he had dried, fell heir to the sickness that he had survived,
and he followed her little body to the grave. His grief was normal,
untortured by boyish remorse, and lasted long enough to serve as buffer
to a deeper grief that followed. The mother who had nursed him so
lovingly followed the sister. He shed no tears now, only his strained
look of dumb and helpless pain indicated that he suffered. He could not
analyze his emotions--could not think, much less question the decree of
Fate that had robbed him of something he was accustomed to, something
he needed. But, as he took his seat at school on the day following the
funeral, he found an immediate cessation of pain that he ascribed to
her silent sympathy. He knew she sympathized--he had seen her at the
crowded doorway of the house when they were taking his mother out--and
the cheer and the charm of his daily proximity to her soon wore out the
grief, and in another year he was again a lively boy, light-hearted,
studious, and combative, following his divinity home each day, and
still worshiping at a distance.

But the Fates had not yet presented the whole of his problem. She was
not in her seat one morning, and he spent a futile day, wondering and
longing, then went near her house after school hours. A boy passed, and
said:

"Zenie Malcolm's dead. Come on up to the ball ground!"

He did not go. The sky had grown suddenly darker, and the summer air
was cold. He walked nearer her home than he had ever gone before, and
there on the doorknob was a black and white drapery, such as they had
hung out for his sister.

"Dead!" he said to himself, and repeated the word again and again;
but he could not understand. He wandered the streets alone, trying
to realize, to accept; but he could not adjust himself to this. Why
should she be dead? He knew his mother was dead, and his sister; but
this could not be! His consciousness refused it. His mental horizon was
close to him, and crowded. This thing could not find entrance.

He did not go home to supper--only when bodily fatigue overcame him did
he creep into the house and up to his bed. He went to sleep easily,
with the word "dead" on his lips, but the realization hammering vainly
at his brain. In the morning, still unawake from the shock, he ate
what breakfast he could force down his throat, and went to school. Her
place was still vacant, and at recess he left the playground, going
near to her home again. The crepe was still on the door, and he walked
the streets as before, muttering, "Dead, dead!" He was absent from the
midday meal; but arrived before supper time, still in a daze. An angry
stepfather read him a note from the principal, reporting the truancy,
and took him out to the woodshed.

"I've had enough of this!" said the man, as he doubled a clothes
line. "You were not home to supper last night; but I said nothing at
breakfast, because I wanted to think it out. I'm going to give you what
you need. Your mother spoiled you, and I always knew it."

He struck the impassive boy round the legs. Partly from this, partly
from the mention of his mother, the tears welled into his eyes, and,
the barriers removed, the uprush overwhelmed him. Down on his face in
the ash heap he fell, sobbing convulsively, while the unrestrained
tears streamed through his fingers.

"Dead!" he said in a choked voice. "Dead, dead! Oh, father, she's dead!
She's dead!"

The abashed stepfather stayed his hand. "I can't very well whip you,
boy, if you feel like this," he said kindly. "I never thought you
cared for your mother. You didn't take on like this when she died, nor
for your sister. Come into the house when you're through crying. I
don't like to hear you." The man went in, troubled in mind at having
misjudged the boy.

The boy sobbed his aching heart dry on the ashes, then lifted his face,
drawn, tear stained, and old--very old, for a boy. "Zenie!" he called
softly. "Zenie, Zenie!" The voice rose to a wail. "Come back! Zenie,
come back! Come back! Oh, God, send her back! Please send her back!
Zenie, come back!" It ended in a cry of utter despair.

Then, close beside him, so close that it seemed almost within his ear,
he heard a voice, clear and distinct, yet without sound or volume, say,
"Yes, I will come."

He stood up and looked around. No one was there. He went out of the
shed; but the back yard was empty. He went back to the ash heap,
marveling to the extent that his benumbed faculties would permit; and
as he sat there, a peace, a tranquillity, and a content that he had
known only in her presence, came to him, and the dragging pain at his
heart passed away.

Peace, tranquillity, and content are poor attributes with which to
fight the battle of life. Being a boy, he soon worked clear of the
shadow of death; but, without the helpful influences of his life he
relapsed into the old shyness and indifference. Deprived of all that
he had loved, he found nothing new to love; and, thus unreceptive, he
ceased to respond to it when given and became unlovable. He lost ground
in study, became sullen, suspicious, and at last incorrigible. When
he had worn out his teachers' and his stepfather's patience, he left
school ungraduated, with a scant knowledge of the lower studies to his
credit. He went to work at driving a delivery wagon, and failed. Again
and again he obtained work of this character, but could not hold his
place.

Then his stepfather, after repeated advice and punishments, gave him
up, furnished him with a suit of clothes and a sum of money, and turned
him out. He sold papers for a time; but lost his money in this venture.
He blacked boots at the few hotels of the small town, until this too
proved a failure. He went off with a circus, and learned of real
hardship and ill treatment; which embittered him the more. He drifted
to New York, a newly fledged hobo, found the Bowery and its adjuncts,
and, seventeen now, and grown nearly to full stature, he was in due
time shanghaied aboard an outbound deep-water ship. At the end of the
voyage he had learned to steer, to loose and furl a royal, and to get
out of the way, which is all that is required of an ordinary seaman,
and thus equipped the crimps saw to it that he signed again. Lacking in
ambition and initiative, he remained at sea, and, compelled to learn,
went through the grades of ordinary and able seaman, becoming in five
years a competent boatswain of square-rigged ships.

Physically he developed into a man of iron, tall, straight, and
symmetrical, brown as a Moor, and with his sullen stare changed to
a meaningless frown. Mentally, except for the growth of a splendid
professional courage, he remained at a standstill. He did not go
backward. He read an occasional book, and the correctness of diction he
had acquired at school remained with him, unspoiled by the associations
of the forecastle. But he was a drifter, an ethical bankrupt, signing
in ships picked by the boarding masters, robbed by them of his money,
lending it when asked, or spending it with hopeless indifference, as
resigned to the life he lived as any fatalist, and unable to realize
that there might be a better within his reach; until, starved into a
mental activity by a long passage on short rations, he moved himself
sufficiently to secure a berth in one of the Atlantic liners, where
good food was plentiful. Here his acquirements were of little use
to him--he scrubbed paint by day and decks by night. But he came in
contact with passengers.

Engaged with bucket and swab on a section of the after saloon one day,
in the dull, apathetic frame of mind that was now natural with him, he
noticed the approach of two passengers, a bewhiskered, peppery looking
man of middle age, and an elderly woman with an unusually kind and
sympathetic face.

"Look there!" said the man, in tones that Bridge could hear. "See what
seamanship amounts to in these floating blast furnaces! That fellow's a
sailor, if I know one, from his head to his heels. But they've made him
a scrubwoman."

"I should think he would try to do better," answered the old lady,
after a searching look at Bridge's expressionless face. "Notice
his bearing. He is Othello, off the stage. There are unlimited
possibilities in such a nature."

They halted near the rail for a further inspection of him. Bridge,
swabbing industriously, pretended not to hear. He had not attracted so
much attention for years.

"See the slumbering fire in those dark eyes," went on the innocent old
lady--"the reserve power, the strength to do, and dare, and die--the
tremendous will of a strong man, who lets nothing baffle him when
aroused. That man has not been aroused. See his hair--"

"Nonsense! A stiff drink'll arouse him."

"There you are again, skeptic," laughed the old lady. "But, I tell
you, eyes and hair indicate character! His hair is the very opposite
of Zaza's, but equally rare and matchless in hue. Each indicates
temperament."

They went on, and Bridge dropped his swab and watched them till they
were out of sight. He had never seen them, to his knowledge, and their
comment on himself and his work had not greatly disturbed him. But the
name Zaza, the name of someone they knew, had seemed familiar. It had
brought the same thrill of recognition that he had experienced years
before at school, when the little girl was called up to sing--the
little girl that died, and whom he had almost forgotten.

"Zaza, Zaza," he repeated to himself. It was a strange name. Where had
he heard it?

It was his lookout at the bow that night from eight to ten, and he took
his place clad in sou'wester and oilskins; for a fog thick as darkness
had settled down on the ship. He could see the stem in front of him,
but little farther in the smudge. Aft was the dim outline of the
windlass, and beyond the dimmer outline of the V-shaped breakwater. To
starboard and port were the two mighty anchors, magnified by the fog.
Eyes were of little use on such a night; but he dutifully kept his ears
open for sound of foghorn or steam whistle, and paced up and down,
thinking of matters unthought of for years--his old home and school
days, his mother and sister, and little golden-haired Zenie who had
died. Step by step he reviewed his life of failure and incompetence.
Voyage after voyage, event after event, men and influences--all came
under the criticism of his aroused faculties, until they ended with
the comment of the old lady on the after deck. "That man has not been
aroused," she had said. Where was the reserve power, the strength, the
will to do, that she had seen in him?

The review went backward, man after man, happening after happening,
to the meeting with his stepfather at the ash pile, and back of this
to the boy in the street, who had told him a casual piece of news and
asked him to the ball ground. Here was where it went out of him--the
courage to do, and strive, and work, and win. He now realized that it
was not the passing away of his mother and his sweet little sister,
nor the mis-judgment of his stepfather and the ill treatment of men,
that had unnerved him; it was the losing of Zenie, who had never looked
at him but once, but whose presence on earth had made him a strong,
victorious boy and a good scholar. And the heart hunger and pain that
had left him at the ash pile came to him again.

"Zenie!" he called almost inaudibly into the fog. "Zenie, come back!
Come back to me!"

A patter of footsteps on the wet deck aroused him, and he looked
around. A small cloaked figure had just clambered over the breakwater,
and it ran up to him, peering into his face with wide-open, wondering
eyes. And they were the eyes of Zenie, set in the same clean-cut little
face fringed with the same golden-hued tresses.

"Did you call me, sir?" she asked. "Oh, I beg pardon. I thought I knew
you, and that you called me. I don't know--" she stepped back. "My
name is Zaza Munson."

"Zaza!" called an anxious voice from the breakwater, and she left him.

The bewhiskered man showed faintly through the fog. "Come along,
kid, and go to bed. You mustn't bother the man on lookout. 'Tisn't
shipshape."

"Papa," said the child as he lifted her over the barrier, "was my name
ever Zenie? Did you call me Zenie when I was little?"

And Bridge, with his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth, and
somewhat unsteady on his feet, could just hear the receding voice of
the man as he answered:

"No, kid; but your aunt's name was Zenie. She died the day before you
were born. You're the dead image of her."

Bridge did not see the child again. He thought of her, of course,
marveling at the resemblance and relationship, which he ascribed to
coincidence--that now had a meaning to him--but marveling the more
at his change of heart, which he ascribed to the kindly thought and
comment of the old lady. It began as a furious disgust at his waste of
time and energy, but became a serious, practical ambition.

He finished the voyage, and for the first time since going to sea
chose his boarding house--the Sailors' Home--and here he talked with
second mates and a better class of seamen. He borrowed an Epitome of
Navigation, looked it over, and bought one in a second-hand shop, with
other books that appealed to him. He stopped drinking, and, with money
in his pocket, was able to choose his next ship, an English deep-water
craft, whose rules were such as to give him his afternoon watch below
and time for study. He furbished up his unused knowledge of arithmetic,
and in this ship found a kindly disposed first mate, who lent him an
old sextant to puzzle over and become familiar with. He reached for the
theory of seamanship as distinct from navigation, and, procuring such
textbooks as he could find in foreign ports, mastered the reasons of
the various evolutions which so far he had helped perform under orders.
When able to, he applied for and passed a second mate's examination,
and won a Board of Trade certificate. Then he bought himself a sextant.

He made two voyages in this ship, when a sick and dying second mate
left a vacancy, and this vacancy was filled by Bridge, who had
attracted the captain's attention by his intelligence and energy.
An officer now, his progress was more rapid. He reached farther,
laying in for private use magazines and standard works of the world's
literature, and gave himself that quiet self-confidence so valuable
in conversation, and so difficult for a seaman to acquire. His voice,
while losing none of its power to be heard against the wind, became
softer and evenly modulated. Few could have told, from his manner and
personality that he had not gone through the usual course of an English
apprentice, with a capital of good home influences to start with, and a
protection from bad as he advanced. No captious shipowner's wife would
have said he was not a gentleman.

In seven years from the birth of his ambition, with an English master's
certificate and an American ocean license to his credit, he shipped
first mate of a large sky-sailyard American ship at New York, and
at the orders of the agent who had engaged him took her down to the
Horseshoe to await the captain, who was also the owner, he said, and
was to join her on the day of sailing. The captain came on the tug that
was to tow them to sea, and stepped aboard, brisk, bewhiskered, and
peppery, and with him was a young woman who, as Bridge was introduced,
he said was his daughter, who would make the voyage with them.

Bridge, after seeing them below, went forward to the windlass, with
his brain reeling as it had reeled on the forecastle deck of the
liner. The captain was the breezy person who had noticed him scrubbing
paint, the daughter the child that had come to him on lookout--whom he
still imagined as a child, but now grown to womanhood, and with the
same pure, clean-cut face, the same wealth of golden hair, and dark
wondering blue eyes--the living, breathing, matured, and perfected
image of the little girl that had gone to the angels twenty years
ago. He felt, as he supervised the weighing of the anchor, as he had
felt when this little girl had come forward to sing to the school,
the glorified sense of recognition, and, added to it, the uplift of
victory and achievement, the content that comes of long search and the
finding of the thing sought. He knew this woman, knew her well, though
she had not spoken a word. He knew her now as part of himself, that he
had missed, and found. And she was here, in the same ship with him! He
would see her daily!

But, as a matter of fact, he saw very little at first. He was a watch
officer, who slept part of each day; and a suspicious and peppery
father, with an eye out for good looks in an otherwise efficient and
valuable first mate, saw to it that she took her meals with him in his
own after cabin, and also that she took her daily exercise on deck
when Bridge was asleep and the ship in charge of the second mate, an
unbeauteous and beauty proof old sea dog. In the exercise of this
watchful function of fatherhood, the old man grew more and more peppery
in his manner toward Bridge and his crew, and finally took no pains
to conceal an actual dislike for the first mate, which no amount of
professional care and forethought on his part could offset.

And it was all wasted energy as far as Bridge was concerned, for a more
inoffensive and non-progressive lover never loved. Try as he might,
he could not bring himself to address her when they occasionally met,
unless she spoke to him first. She seemed to carry in her personality
an inhibition on his thought, speech, and action that prevented an
overture. And this continued until the ship had rounded the Cape of
Good Hope and sailed along the fortieth parallel to the vicinity of St.
Paul, by which time the father, having worried himself into insomnia,
was compelled to relax his vigilance by the physical necessity of
sleeping as long as he could, night or day, whenever sleep came to him,
and the daughter, intent upon matters far removed from love and lovers,
unconsciously placed herself in the way of a better acquaintance with
Bridge.

She came on deck alone one night in the first watch, when the ship was
tearing along before a quarterly breeze that she could barely carry
the kites under, and from the break of the poop watched Bridge on the
main deck giving the last orders toward the setting of a main royal
staysail; then, as he mounted the poop steps, she accosted him.

"Mr. Bridge," she said, holding up her father's sextant, "will you
please point out to me the Magellan Clouds and the Coal Sacks?"

"Why, certainly," said Bridge, all his shyness vanishing. "Come around
to the lee quarter, Miss Munson. I've noticed you before with the
sextant. Studying navigation?"

"Yes, as I can. Father has tutored me, and I've got as far as meridian
observations and chronometer time; but I want to go farther, and father
is a bad teacher. He's somewhat cross, and, Mr. Bridge, do you know I
think I'm going beyond him!" She smiled a little roguishly.

"That ought to be easy," answered Bridge. "You are young, with a fresh
mind. It is hard for men to study."

"But so easy to do other things--to command ships, to fight, to shoot,
to ride horses, to swim. I'm a swimmer, though it took me years to
learn. I swam a mile once."

"You can beat me," answered Bridge simply. "I cannot swim at all."

"I am ambitious," she said, "to do what men do. My present fad is
navigation. I shall never be satisfied until I have an ocean license."

"It is a great force in you, Miss Munson," said Bridge earnestly. "It
is rare in women; but men feel it now and then. It gripped me seven
years ago, and lifted me from the forecastle to the cabin. Do you
remember?"

"What?" she asked.

"The man on lookout in the _Umbria_, on the night you came forward,
when you thought I had called to you? Remember, it was foggy, and your
father came after you."

"Was that you?" she asked. "Oh, now I understand. Oh, Mr. Bridge! No, I
don't understand. I thought I knew you then, and I have thought since I
came aboard that I knew you, that I had met you somewhere; but father--"

"Never mind, Miss Munson. These things are inexplicable. I thought, as
the years went on, that it was a certain, curious sort of praise of
myself, from an old lady I saw with your father that day, when I was
aft scrubbing paintwork."

"My grandmother. She died last year."

"I thought it was her good opinion of me," went on Bridge earnestly;
"but now I know it was your visit on the forecastle. Miss Munson, you
were then the exact duplicate of a little girl who died at thirteen--a
little girl that I worshipped as one of God's angels, and who went to
the angels. Her name was Zenie. I have read of reincarnation. I wonder
if it is possible that her soul returned--in you."

The girl stiffened and drew back, while her eyes opened in the old
wonder of the night on the forecastle. Bridge, looking forward, went on
gravely:

"What right have we--poor wretched human souls!--to say that we will
do this or that thing, that we will strive and succeed, when there are
forces within us past our understanding, that decide the matter for us?
I loved that little girl Zenie. She made me a plucky, ambitious boy.
She died, and I became a wreck, a tramp, a scrubwoman on a liner. I saw
you, and went to work; and here I am--as a sailor a practical success.
I once read a poem that I liked. I forget the title and the author; but
one verse ran like this:

    "'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
        Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit--'"

A heavy cane came down on his head, and an angry voice broke in, "Damn
you! Is this what I shipped a first mate for? To keep my daughter up
till near midnight, and wake me up making love to her over my window?
Zaza, go below at once!" The captain had rounded the corner of the
house in his pajamas.

The girl screamed as the cane was poised for a second blow; but Bridge
said nothing, nor did the cane descend again. The mate raised his two
arms high above his head, leaned backward over the low poop-rail,
sagged down, and slid headlong over it into the sea.

Again the girl screamed, and the captain, shouting "Man overboard!"
sprang to a life-buoy fastened to the taffrail, tore it loose, and
threw it. "My God! what have I done?" he said chokingly. "I did not
mean to knock him overboard."

No one heard this. The girl had swooned in the alley, and the man at
the wheel was snugly ensconced in a warm, sound-proof wheelhouse, with
but one window open.

"Put your wheel down!" ordered the captain through the window. "Bring
her up till she shakes. All hands forward, there! Come aft four men and
clear away this quarter-boat. Weather main-brace the rest of you!"

They did all that men may do. They hove the ship to, lowered a boat,
and searched till daylight. But Bridge, who could not swim, was not
found; and the ship went on, with a remorseful captain trying to
comfort a frantic girl, who in two days was down with brain-fever.

Zaza was a troublesome patient, and as the captain had now to stand
watch with his second mate he could give her little of the attention
she needed--he could spend with her only an hour or so from each watch
below, and, if all was well with the ship, a few minutes from the
watch on deck. In her lucid moments there was small comfort for the
unhappy man. Not a drop of medicine would she take from his hand, nor
a morsel of food, and not a word would she speak to him; but in the
steady, scornful, unforgiving look in her dark blue eyes was a world of
reproach.

Yet, when the fever pressed her hard, she would talk, calling him
"father," and ask him to look so that he too could see. And, as he
could not look into the realm she was in, she must perforce explain,
insisting that he could see if only he would look. For she could see
so clearly, she said; and as her explanations were repeated again and
again, broken in upon by the awakenings to lucidity, it was some time
before what she saw took on sequence and color. Then it was a picture
and a story complete.

A long, heaving sea she saw first, and a floating life-buoy; then a
man clinging to its edge, not intelligently, as would a man who knows
life-buoys and the way to use them. This man made no attempt to place
it under his arms; he simply clung to its edge, and was frequently
immersed, as the circular ring turned in the water. This man was Mr.
Bridge, she said; but on his face was no perturbation as to his plight.
He smiled, and clung to the life-buoy as though animated by instinct
alone. There was no expression other than the smile, nothing of shock,
nor interest, nor anxiety. With the rising of the sun there came into
the picture a lateen-rigged craft filled with swarthy men, and it
steered close to the man; and they pulled him, still smiling vacantly,
into the vessel. They gave him a flagon to drink from; but he would
not, till tutored. They put food to his mouth, and after a time he ate
mechanically.

The picture now embraced a high, mountainous coast, deeply indented
with fiords and bays, and the dark men of the lateen craft were
landing, taking with them the smiling man who could not eat nor drink
without help. Then she saw him wandering alone along the beach in the
rain, still smiling, and looking at the sea from which he had escaped.
She saw him again, unkempt and unshaven, still alone, still smiling;
and later with his clothing in tatters, his hair to his shoulders, his
beard covering his features, and the merciless rain beating him. But
though his mouth and chin were hidden, in his eyes was still the vacant
look at the sea, and the smile. One more picture completed the list;
he was more than ever a creature of rags and ends, and emaciated--a
living, breathing skeleton, asleep in a cave, but smiling as he slept.

It ended in time, and Captain Munson sailed his ship into Melbourne
with his daughter convalescent, but so worn out himself that he
deputized another skipper to unload her and take her up the China
Sea with a cargo of wool, while he and the girl recuperated. She was
still reserved, if not frigid, in her manner; but never alluded to the
unfortunate happening that killed her filial love for him. And little
by little the color came to her cheek, and the light to her eye, so
that her father hoped that her trouble of mind had left her.

But he hoped too much. She came to him one day and said, "Father, when
does the ship come back?"

"Ought to be here next week, Zaza. Why?"

"Have you chartered her?"

"Thought of a load of hides for New York."

"Give it up. You will admit that she belongs to me, will you not?"

"When you're of age, of course. Your grandmother left you everything."

"I was of age yesterday--twenty-one, legal age in all countries. As I
own the ship, I shall decide what to do with her."

"What do you want to do?"

"Go back to the middle of the Indian Ocean. There is a man there who
needs help."

"Daughter, Zaza, my poor girl! Your mind has left you. Don't be so
absurd. He is dead. He could not have lived. You know I'm sorry. I'll
never forgive myself. But this will do no good."

"He is not dead. He is calling me all the time. I hear it strongest
as I waken from sleep. I hear it as I have heard it all my life. He
calls me the name I called myself when little, before I knew my own
name. I called myself Zenie. I would say Zenie will do this, or that.
And ever since I can remember I have heard this voice calling to me,
'Zenie, come back!' I heard it in the fog that night on the steamship,
and I went to him. I could not help it. He was the man on lookout, and
I seemed to know him. You came after me. Do you recall it? He told me
later that he had loved a little girl named Zenie, who died. I am that
girl. I know it. I know it!"

"Great God, girl! What nonsense is this? Are you crazy?"

"I fear I may be unless this stops," she answered, pausing in her
restless pacing of the floor, and looking at him with dilated eyes.
"I dreamed of him this morning. He was on land, and it was raining.
His clothing was in tatters, he was bearded, and his hair was long and
matted. He was thin with starvation and suffering; but he called to me,
so beseechingly, 'Zenie, come back!'"

"You had such ravings when you were delirious, Zaza. It is part of your
fever, nothing more."

"It is more! It is truth! He is alive, or I should not hear. Were he
dead, I should not be alive; for he called me back from the unknown to
meet him and help him. He needs me now. I am going to him!"

The father stared in silence, while the girl walked the floor.

"I expect you to waive all legal transfer of the property," she went
on. "I expect you to recognize me as owner of the ship, and to take her
where I direct. If you will not, I shall take such action as I find
necessary, or possible, and employ another captain. If I am thwarted, I
shall go myself. I am a navigator."

"Zaza, you are mad!" said the father solemnly.

"Do not say that, or I shall go mad. There are things in life past our
comprehension or analysis. This is one of them. All I know is what I
feel--that he is part of myself, or I part of him."

"You have fallen in love with him, and you think these things."

"Do not confound cause and effect."

"What land is he on? Do you pretend to know that?"

"We shall find him. Something will guide us--God, if you like."

The father regarded her fixedly for a moment; then sighed, and said, "I
suppose I may as well humor you, for a while at least. We shall take in
ballast as soon as she arrives, and go. But what a waste of time!"

So the big ship, able to earn an annual dividend of sixteen per cent.
of her cost, left Melbourne in ballast, practically in charge of a
crazed girl bent on finding a man drowned ten months before.

According to accepted standards no alienist would have hesitated in
pronouncing her crazed. She slept little, was careless of her personal
appearance, and walked the deck aimlessly, occasionally peering at
the compass, and looking at the helmsman in a way to make him steer
better for a time. She nagged her father when stress of wind compelled
the shortening of sail. She took the sun at midday with Bridge's
sextant, and took chronometer sights to work out the longitude,
sharply criticizing her father for an error of a few seconds in his
calculations. She grudged the necessity of reaching south to the
forty-fifth parallel to avoid the strong head winds on the fortieth.
Night and day she was up, worrying her distracted father and the two
mates with questions, comments, and speculations. She pored over the
chart, on which was pricked off the ship's position when Bridge had
gone overboard, and pricked off herself the daily position as the ship
beat her way westward.

But it was not till the ship had arrived at the fatal spot, and
her father had prepared a series of logical deductions for her
consideration, that she showed anything of definiteness in her whims
and fancies. She had insisted that they heave the ship to that night,
as she did not care to go farther in the darkness, and had lain down to
pass the night as she could--not to sleep, she told her father, but to
pray to God for light and hope and method. And in an hour she was up.

"Father," she said as she awakened the old man in his berth, "we must
head south by west, half west. I know the course."

"What do you know?" grunted the wearied and conscience stricken man.
"Go back to bed, and let me sleep! Sleep yourself! Let me alone, or
I'll be as mad as you are!"

She got out the chart and spread it on the cabin table. Then, with her
eyes gleaming with the concentrated stare of the insane, she traced
out the drift of the ship since the last plotting, and from the point
reached drew a line south by west, half west. It struck a large,
irregular island, and she read its name, Desolation Island. She went on
deck, disheveled and careless, her hair flying in the wind, and asked
the officer of the watch to heave the log and give her the best of his
judgment as to the ship's drift through the night. Then she went back
to her berth, and did not appear until daylight, when she came up and
again interviewed the officer in charge.

"Father," she said, when the old man had turned out for breakfast,
"look at this chart." She spread it out, clear of the dishes, and drew
a line from the night time position of the ship to the point indicated
by her drift, and from this point drew a line south by west. It
intercepted the other on the coast of Desolation Island.

"Last night, father," she said, "he was calling insistently. I saw
him plainly, and he held a compass in his hands, and pointed to the
lubber's point. It was at south by west, half west. I told you that;
but you refused to believe me. I have plotted the drift during the
night--eleven miles due southwest--and here is the drift on this line.
Here, too, is our position this morning. Just before I wakened I saw a
large compass, filling the whole room, and the lubber's point was at
south by west. A south by west line from here intercepts the same spot
on the coast of Desolation Island as the other. Father, he is there! It
all fits in. We must go to him."

"Well, well, we'll try," said the old man weakly. "God knows I want
to ease your mind, and until you are sure I suppose you'll think he's
still alive. It's a tough job, though, to search an island eighty miles
long where it rains continually."

Sail was made, and the wheel put up; but as the wind was light it was
nightfall before the big, light ship sailed into an estuary, with two
men at the leadlines, and anchored in the dusk, not half a mile from
the beach. The girl would have lowered a boat and gone ashore at once;
but this was beyond all reason, they told her, the two mates joining
the captain in the protest. This was not what they had signed for, they
contended.

So, up and down from her berth to the deck, and back and forth from end
to end of the ship, the half demented young woman passed the night,
and at the first glimmer of daylight was beyond her limitations. The
quarter boat was proved leaky, and had been left behind. All others
were inboard, stowed upside down on the forward house. The ship's one
life-buoy had gone with Bridge.

She procured a piece of spun yarn from the booby hatch, triced her
skirts up to her waist, and, unseen by the sleepy anchor watch forward,
went down the side on a rope's end belayed to a pin. There was a brisk
wind blowing in from the open sea, and a short, crispy wave motion with
which she must contend; but she struck out bravely for the beach.

"I am coming!" she called wildly. "I am coming--coming!"

Skilled seamen and fishermen are often deceived in the look of a surf
viewed from seaward, and many a boat's crew that hopes to beach safely
is caught and half drowned in a furious turmoil that can be seen only
from the shore. This mad girl had no advantage of such experience, and
probably would not have been influenced by it had it come to her. She
swam vigorously at first, then rested awhile on her back, and went on,
swimming till tired, and floating until rested.

But, at a hundred yards from the beach, she found conditions which
precluded these spells of rest. The seas broke over her, and floating
was impossible. She was forced to expend her strength. Then the
spun-yarn belt loosened, and her skirts embarrassed her movements;
it became more and more difficult to make headway. All she could do
was to keep her head above water, while the aching pain of fatigue
attacked her limbs, and the bitter salt water flung into her mouth by
the spiteful seas choked its way down her throat, and into her lungs.
Struggling weakly, and more weakly, she sank beneath and remained until
consciousness was nearly gone; then the back wash of the undertow
brought her to the surface, and with the one breath of air she procured
came another inrush of water. Barely moving her limbs now, she went
under again; and when next she appeared she had ceased to struggle, or
breathe, or think.

Once more she went under, and when she came to light the surf was
rolling her up the beach, and dragging her back--an inert, lifeless
form, with eyes wide open and staring, and a wealth of golden hair
wrapped round the pale and wasted face. A final heave of the pitiless
sea threw her face downward on a fringe of rocks at high-water mark.
One large stone caught the body at the waist line, and the head sank
down beyond it until the forehead rested on another. Thus supported,
the chin sank, the mouth opened, and the water from her lungs issued
forth in a tiny stream and went back into the sea, which, having killed
her, now left her alone.

But the cold rain still pelted her.

       *       *       *       *       *

A mile away a thing crawled out of a cave--a mindless creature in the
form of a man, a disorganized organism that looked into the morning sky
with lightless eyes and meaningless smile. Emaciated and begrimed, with
hair and beard to his shoulders, clad in what had once been shirt and
trousers, but were now a flimsy covering of rags, he presented but one
human attribute beyond his meaningless smile: the articulate voice.

He began to move, in a swift walk that soon increased to a jog trot and
then to a run. Straight as a path may go, over rocks, hills, and marshy
ground, down the declivity to the sea, went this smiling creature,
pausing at times to look into the sky and murmur, "Zenie, come back!"

There was something yellow on the beach, right in his path, and at the
same swift run he approached it. He stood silently over the quiet form
of the dead girl, looking at it with smile unchanged, but with the
beginning of expression flitting and twitching over his gaunt features.
Then he stooped and turned the body over, bringing to view the pale,
damp face.

"Zenie, come back!" he breathed softly. "Zenie, come back!"

The girl's chest rose convulsively, and sank, then rose again with a
deeper inhalation, and the staring eyes closed.

The mindless thing stood erect, with a face suffused by a rush of
blood, staggered, and turned; then, in a deep, sonorous voice,
declaimed:

    "'Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
        Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.'"

It was the finish of the quatrain begun by Bridge, and interrupted by
the blow of the cane.

"What?" he continued, as he looked down on the faintly breathing figure
of the girl. "Miss Munson! What--what is it? Where are we? We were in
the alleyway a minute ago. What has happened? Tell me! Where's the
ship?"

The girl's eyes opened, and a faint smile came to her face.

"What is it?" he insisted, stooping down and taking her cold, wet
hands. "Miss Munson, what has happened? We're ashore, and you're all
wet! Have you been overboard? You said you could swim! Why, there's the
ship now, at anchor! They're putting off with a boat! But why? Tell me,
Miss Munson! What does it mean? I've grown a beard! Why--tell me! What
is it? Zaza, tell me!"

The cold, wet hands of the girl closed gently on his big, bony fingers.
"Not Zaza!" she whispered. "Zenie! I am Zenie! I know I am!"




                           THE SLEEP WALKER


There was nothing abnormal in the character of Beverton except a
tendency, while very young, to walk in his sleep, and nothing in his
twenty-five years of life of which he was really ashamed except a deed
of his infancy, born of the above-named tendency, for which he had been
severely punished at the time. The punishment, no doubt, impressed the
incident on his mind, and he recalled it occasionally, always with a
flush of shame, while he lived his years of boyhood, youth, and early
manhood. He remembered being rudely awakened from sleep, not in a crib
where his mother had placed him, nor beside her, where he sometimes
slept, but flat on his back on the carpeted floor of a long hall, dimly
illumined by distant gas jets, the soft glow from which showed him a
woman in a night-robe looking down upon him with angry eyes, and a
purple-faced child, a little younger than himself, gasping and choking
in her arms. His cheek burned from the slap she had given him, and his
head hurt from the impact with the floor, so he joined the other baby
in protest, and the uproar brought several uniformed hall-boys and a
night clerk, who led him to the room occupied by his parents. After
punishment, and when able to understand, he learned what he had done in
his sleep--left his crib, sought the hall, buried his small fingers in
the throat of this other sleep-walking infant--whom he had never seen
before--and might possibly have murdered it had not its mother wakened
and arrived in time to interfere. He was well spanked for the feat.

His mother believed in both punishment and prayer as factors in reform.
For a long time he received nightly spankings in bed, with injunctions
to stay where he was put until morning, and supplemented his "Now I lay
me down to sleep" with a plea to be cured of his infirmity.

The treatment was successful; the unconscious cerebration left him, but
the spankings continued until he had outgrown the conscious cruelty
common to all children, then, having ceased vivisection of insects and
angle-worms, and overcome his antagonism to the aged, the helpless,
and the infirm of his own species, he began his development into a
cheery, generous, and humane character, which, assisted by good health,
good home training, and a good education, found, at manhood, outward
expression in six feet of good looks.

These good points brought him a wife--a creature as well favored as
himself, but his very antithesis in disposition and physique. He was
of the blond type, calm, masterful, and imperturbable in temperament;
she of the brunette, warm-hearted, and impulsive, yielding him neither
obedience nor spoken approval, and meeting him half-way only upon the
common ground of love, which Mother Nature provides for the agreement
of her opposites.

Beverton was content with her, and managed her in a way peculiar to
himself. Whether it was the best way or not, is hard to decide; for it
is possible that with more antagonism from him there would have been
less from her. But it was successful. As instance--she had thrown a
plate of newly buttered griddle-cakes across the breakfast table; her
aim being good, they had struck him fairly in the face, and the melted
butter smeared not only his face and shirt-front, but a gorgeous puff
cravat which her own fingers had made for him. He smilingly left the
table, changed his raiment, and they finished breakfast in silence;
then, instead of going to business, he cleared the kitchen table and
began cleaning the neckwear. A full hour he spent at the task, much in
her way and to the neglect of his business, when she broke her moody
silence with:

"What are you doing? Why do you not go down town?"

"I will soon, my dear," he answered amiably. "Just as soon as I get the
syrup and butter out of this tie you made. I don't mind washing my face
twice instead of once, but I hate to see this tie soiled."

She was upon him instantly, her arms about his neck and tears in her
eyes, while she begged, brokenly, for forgiveness. It was granted,
of course, and for a long time griddle-cakes were omitted from their
discussions.

Again, inspired by a natural and wifely desire to "jog some spirit into
him," she had carefully prepared a slippery place on the front yard
walk which a slight snow concealed from his view when he arrived in the
evening. He came down hard, and though he was not hurt, he pretended
to be; for he saw through her trick at once, and to punish her howled
for assistance and blamed his own carelessness, but uttered no word of
suspicion or reproach. Neighbors assisted him in, and all that evening,
prone upon the couch, he enjoyed the ministrations of a contrite and
tearful wife, who tried to atone for her sins of commission (and
omission, for she did not confess) by softly spoken sympathy and
frequent service of watered brandy to relieve the pain--a remedy which
Beverton liked, but which was denied him as a beverage.

And so, as their young married life went on, he shamed and tamed her,
not by breaking her spirit, but by compelling her to break it herself;
and though she remained a tigress against those she _imagined_ his
enemies--for the man had none--she displayed toward him an attitude of
meekness, adoration, and almost slavish obedience which made him at
times regret the transformation; for her tantrums were the charm which
had first attracted him.

But at this period it seemed to him that the tantrums had struck in.
They slept in separate rooms, and one night he awoke to find her
leaning over him with a pail of water poised above his head. Before he
could catch the tilting pail, she had deluged him, but even this did
not disturb his equanimity; he merely sprang out of bed, caught her by
the arm, and asked what he had done to deserve a ducking. She answered
with a scream, and, dropping the pail, clung to him in the darkness.
She did not know where she was--she could not explain, but at last he
understood.

"Do you walk in your sleep, Grace?" he asked, gently.

"Oh, no--yes," she stammered; "but not since our marriage. I thought it
had left me. Oh, I'm so sorry. Did I waken you?"

"With a bucket of water," he answered, dryly as was possible in his
moist condition. "I had the habit when very young, but they cured me by
radical treatment. You're too old to be punished, Grace, but we must
find _some_ way. You may set fire to me next time."

But he knew of no way, and when she had repeated the feat with the pail
of water, and a little later made a midnight assault upon him with
the carving-knife, he could only nail her bedroom window partly open
for ventilation, and put a bolt on his side of her door. Her grief
and horror were pathetic, and it sorely tried Beverton to lock up his
wife like a wild beast; but she had become a menace to his health,
and perhaps his life; for, though on each occasion he had wakened in
time to realize her intent, he had not wakened in time to save himself
completely. He had not quite avoided the downcoming knife; aimed at his
heart, it had grazed his arm as he wrenched from under.

It was a very fine piece of polished hardware, this knife--and belonged
to a carving-set given to them at their wedding. On the day following
her demonstration with it, and before he had announced her sentence of
nightly imprisonment, she had bound the knife, fork, and steel together
with a rosette of ribbons, and with the aid of a step-ladder hung them
high on the dining-room wall; then she burned the ladder, and when
Beverton arrived in the evening showed him the exhibit.

"There," she said, with a determined little frown, "is the only deadly
weapon in the house, and it is out of my reach. Let it stay there; I
hate the sight of it, and could never bear to have it on the table
again; but if it be up there--out of the way--where I can't help seeing
it, perhaps--perhaps--it will--" The rest was convulsive sobbing.

Beverton comforted her, and meaning to lock her up at bedtime,
suggested putting the harrowing reminder out of sight in some safe
place; but she would not consent, even though she approved of the bolt
on her door.

"I might find that knife in my sleep, no matter where you hid it," she
said. "Lock me up, instead, and then, if I pick the lock, I cannot
reach the knife."

So there it remained, and as they used their dining-room for a
sitting-room and as she had resolutely placed the beribboned and
glittering display squarely opposite her favorite seat, she had full
opportunity of benefiting by any deterrent influence it possessed. As
to its possessing such an influence, she could only surmise and hope;
however, she confessed that it fascinated her.

"I can't keep my eyes off it," she explained one evening, while they
sat reading in the dining-room. "For the dozenth time to-night I've
found my gaze creep up to that knife. Why is it? And the hateful thing
makes me sleepy--just looking at it."

"Well," responded Beverton, grimly, "if it could only keep you asleep,
it would be all right, wouldn't it?" Then, observing that the speech
had pained her, he arose, kissed the flushed cheek, and added gently,
"Don't look at it, girl; face the other way and get interested in your
book. What are you reading?"

"It's so hard to get interested," she said, wearily, "in what you
don't understand. It's a sea novel." She held up the book and turned
the leaves. "What does topgallant clewlines mean, Tom?--fore-and-aft,
clew-up and clew-down? And here's a word, 'mizzen.' And
clew-garnet--what does that mean? It's a strange language."

"Blest if I know. Pick the story out. Never mind the descriptions."

They resumed their reading, and it was ten minutes later when Beverton,
aroused by the unusual quiet, looked again at his wife. The book lay
on her lap, held open by her hands, but she was not reading--she was
staring up at the hardware glistening in the lamplight, with eyes that
were wide-open, but almost as lightless as the eyes of a corpse. And
as Beverton looked at them, the eyelids fluttered together and closed
in sleep. Beverton watched, and in a moment they opened, with an
expression in them that he had never seen before--so strange, hard, and
murderous it seemed.

"Grace," said the startled man, rising to his feet, "are you awake?"

"Awake," she screamed--"screech" better describes the hard, raspy tone
with which she answered him. "Aye, awake and ready--for eighteen hours,
come eight bells; and all guns o' the port battery down the mizzen
hatch, and all hands drunk but the cook. What's to do?"

"Wake up, Grace," he commanded.

A convulsive shiver passed through her, she uttered a little gasp, then
closed her eyes, and opened them with her natural smile.

"Why, I did go to sleep, after all, didn't I?" she asked, softly.

"Yes, and talked and looked like the very deuce. Let's see what you are
reading." He took the book from her hands, but neither on the open page
nor upon any preceding could he find words similar to those she had
spoken.

"What were you dreaming of when I spoke to you?" he inquired.

"I didn't dream--at least, I don't remember. Did you speak?" She yawned
and arose. "I'll go to bed, Tom," she said. "Lock me up."

Beverton read the book, after she had retired, from the beginning to
the opened page; then sat down and pondered far into the night.

Next evening, on his way home, he visited a physician--a personal
friend, who had once met Mrs. Beverton--and to him he stated the
trouble.

"Self-hypnotized," said the doctor, "by the usual method--staring at a
bright object. Practically in the same condition as when sleep-walking.
You can cure her by suggestion."

"How--what do you mean?"

"Don't you know that a somnambulist will always obey orders--will
believe anything that is spoken in a firm, commanding tone, the same
as though hypnotized?"

"She didn't look and act like it. And where did she get that sailor
talk? It wasn't in the book she was reading."

"The book suggested the train of thought, nevertheless. The
subconscious memory is absolute. She read those words at some time in
her life, or heard them spoken--possibly in infancy."

"Well, it's too much for me. Can you take charge of her case?"

"No--although there is not, perhaps, a man in town more studied in
this subject than myself. But there is no one more unfit to operate.
I am too subjective, as the phrase is--too good a subject, easily
hypnotized, and thus unable to control even a self-hypnotized person.
As there is not a professional hypnotist in town it devolves upon you."

"But I know nothing about it."

"Learn. Your natural mastery over her renders you the one above all
others to treat her successfully. Let her stare at the knife again--or
any bright object. Lead back into her past, and try to find what was
on her mind when she first walked in her sleep; then tell her that her
fears or anxiety were groundless, and that she must never get up in her
sleep again."

He gave Beverton as much of practical instruction as was safe for a
novice to possess, and with some misgivings the half-credulous young
husband resolved to experiment alone. But in his first attempt to do
so, he found unexpected developments in the situation that seemed to
remove the solution farther yet from his powers.

Not daring to take her into his confidence, he waited, evening after
evening, for her to place herself under favoring conditions--to take
up the wearying tale of the sea, and to rest her eyes and brain by
staring at the glistening array of steel on the wall. She capriciously
and vivaciously declared that she would have nothing more to do with
either, that she would divert her mind by polishing up her neglected
accomplishment of stenography (from practice of which he had rescued
her by marriage), and while he fidgeted and made occasional more or
less adroit references to the story, which he pretended to admire, she
translated into hieroglyphics the random thoughts of her brain.

"For if I make a widow of myself some night," she said, "and an angel
of you, Tommie, and escape execution, I will need to earn my living,
don't you see? But if you like that horrid story, suppose you read to
me from where I left off, and I'll take it down for practice."

He had committed himself, and was bound to the task. He began at the
top of the page and read, but she mercifully stopped him part way to
the bottom, so that she might transcribe her notes and verify. This
measured her interest in the story, and as he had none himself he
gladly ceased, and she began her transcription. While waiting for her
he glanced at the ornament on the wall. It was bright, pleasing to the
eye--artistic in finish and design. It attracted his gaze, and having
secured it, held it; for the longer he looked the less inclined he felt
to look elsewhere, and at last, with the knife filling his vision to
the exclusion of the fork and steel, his eyelids drooped and his senses
left him.

When he wakened he was on his knees, with hands clasped in supplication
before his wife, who, with tears in her eyes, but with laughter
quivering on her lips--in fact, nearly hysterical, had arisen from her
chair with her pencil and notebook.

"Why, Tom," she said, "what is the matter with you? You were not
yourself; it was so absurd and ridiculous. Did you go to sleep, and do
you talk in your sleep, as I walk in mine?"

"No," he answered, rising and blinking sheepishly. "Did I? Yes, perhaps
I did doze off--in the chair. Did I get up?"

"Yes, and got down--on your knees to me, with your eyes impassionedly
fixed on mine--oh, it was so funny, but it frightened me; you were
so intense--and you delivered yourself of--well, I took it down in
shorthand, and I'll transcribe it first, and then read."

He sat down in his chair, and she worked busily for a few moments, and
then said: "Now, I'll read first what I took down from that horrid
sea-story, and you take the book and follow me to see if I've made
mistakes."

He picked up the book from the floor, found the page, and scanned it
while she read from her copy as follows:

"'--which had blown, at times, with a force that nearly amounted to a
little gale, was lulling and becoming uncertain, as though awed by the
more violent power that was gathering along the borders of the sea, in
the direction of the neighboring continent. Each moment the eastern
puffs of air lost their strength and became more and more feeble,
until, in an incredibly short period, the heavy sails were heard
flapping against the masts--a frightful and ominous calm succeeding.'

"Now," she said, "did I make any mistakes in this?"

"No," he answered, "word for word it is correct."

"Very well. You know I stopped you at this point, and when I had
written it out in longhand, I said 'I'm ready. Go on,' and turned to
a new page; but you, instead of reading more, dropped the book, got
down on your knees, and--just listen--you uttered this in tones of the
utmost distress:

"'Sir, my life is in your hands; but as to my body, in relation to that
which you would persuade me to, my soul shall sooner be separated from
it, through the violence of your arms, than I shall condescend to your
request.'"

"And I said that in my sleep?" inquired the amazed Beverton.

"You did," laughed his wife, "in the most plaintive, piping feminine
accents imaginable. You were a perfect picture of virtue in distress.
What were you dreaming of?"

"I don't remember. Isn't this the page"--he glanced at the book--"that
you were reading when you fell asleep the other evening?"

"Yes, I think so; but I was looking at the knife when I dropped off."

"So was I," he responded. "Now, this is one of Cooper's tales, written,
I think, about the middle of this century; and, though it is full
of nautical language, there is nothing in it, up to this page, that
resembles this prayerful speech of mine, or your reprehensible language
the other evening, which you uttered, by the way, in hoarse, masculine
tones."

"Did I?" she asked. "What did I say?"

"Something about 'eight bells,' and 'all hands drunk.' I've forgotten
it all; but did you ever listen to any sailor yarns? Have you ever read
any sea-stories besides this?"

"I never saw a sailor in my life, that I know of. I never read a
sea-story, either, and never shall. I don't like them."

"Then it isn't the book, Grace, that affects us; it must be the knife.
It is merely a bright object which, if looked at steadily, will put a
person into a hypnotic sleep. At least, that is what I have heard."

"And then we talk," she said. "But why should you talk like a virtuous
maiden and I like a bad man?"

"I don't know," he said. "I know very little of hypnotism."

"Thomas Beverton," she said, with mock severity, "did you ever listen
to a prayer from a helpless female in your power?"

"No," he answered, laughing. "No, I swear it. I've always done the
praying myself."

"I suppose so," she rejoined, with a pout. Then, rising, she added: "If
you are going to talk in your sleep, I'm going to listen, and I'll know
all about your love affairs, remember that."

And with this truly feminine disposition of the question, she went to
bed.

Beverton secured a broom from the kitchen and, reaching up, unhooked
the carving-set and examined each piece carefully. The fork was a
fork, the steel a steel, the knife a knife--simple in design and
workmanship--such as could be found in any hardware store; but
the knife possessed one slight peculiarity that his questioning
eye noticed. Though it was ground in the conventional bowie-knife
shape, yet the blade as a whole had more curve than is usual in
carving-knives, while the long concave in the back of the blade,
near the point, was very short and deep. A further exaggeration of
these peculiarities would have given the blade the look of a Moorish
scimitar; but, even so, would have carried no occult significance to
Beverton's mind, and as it certainly did possess an unpleasant and
material connection with the problem before him, he decided to remove
it. Putting on his hat and overcoat, he took the three pieces out to
the back yard and hurled them, one by one, over the fence into a deep
snow-drift. Then he returned and, as was his custom, read until sleepy.

It was two hours later before the desired condition arrived, and laying
down his book, he discovered that he had not bolted his untrusty wife
in her room. He arose and looked in, only to see that her bed was
empty. He called, but she did not answer, and, thoroughly awake now,
he ran through the rooms of the house, but did not find her. As he
reached the dining-room, however, to don his hat and coat, he saw her
enter from the kitchen. She was in her nightdress, which was wet with
clinging snow; in her eyes was the lightless stare of somnambulism, and
in her hand the knife. In spite of his temperament, Beverton shivered
as he watched her expressionless stare, then remembering his friend's
instructions, pulled himself together, and said:

"Drop that knife. Drop it at once."

The knife clattered on the floor; he advanced, picked it up, and placed
it on the sideboard. Then he faced her, calm and determined, resolved
to solve the problem.

"Why do you walk in your sleep?" he demanded. She stood quiescent
before him; and though her features moved with inward emotion, she did
not reply.

"Why do you walk in your sleep?" he again demanded. "Answer me."

"To save myself," she said, slowly, and in plaintive, aggrieved tones.

"From whom?" asked Beverton.

"From my enemy--who would kill me."

"Who is your enemy? Why would he kill you?"

"I do not know. I know I must kill him, or he will kill me."

"This is nonsense," said Beverton, sternly, warming to the problem.

"Nonsense?" Her face seemed troubled, as though the mind behind was in
doubt.

"Rank nonsense. No one would harm you. Everyone loves you. What makes
you think he would kill you?"

"He tried." The set face of the young wife took on an expression of
fright and horror. "He met me when I was looking for him, trying to
explain. He clutched me by the throat. He would have killed me if he
could. He will kill me yet if I cannot explain."

"When did he choke you?" asked Beverton. "Where was it?" he asked,
with perspiration starting from his forehead and an incident of his
childhood in his mind.

"In the hall--the long hall."

"He was a baby," ventured Beverton. "How could he harm you?"

She waited a moment, as though the question puzzled her, then said:

"A baby, yes. I was a baby, too."

"Where was this long hall?"

Again the play of emotion on her features, but no answer.

"Was it in a hotel?"

"A hotel, yes."

"What hotel? Where was it?"

"The Mansion House, Main Street, Buffalo."

Beverton shook in the knees. She had named the hotel where his parents
had stopped while traveling--where he had last walked in his sleep.

"Grace," he said, as firmly and gently as he could with his tongue
trembling against the roof of his mouth. "He did not mean to hurt you;
he did not know you at the time. He will never hurt you. You must never
seek him again, either to kill or explain to him. He is satisfied."

"Has he forgiven? Does he realize that--that--I--that--"

Her face became troubled again, and she reached forth her hands,
clutching at the air, as though trying to grasp the elusive memory.

"Yes, he has forgiven," said Beverton, steadier of voice now at the
apparent success of the experiment. "And you will never seek him again,
will you? It is all settled now."

"All settled," she repeated, while her countenance softened.

"You will not worry any more, will you?"

"No more. It is all settled. He has forgiven me."

"You will never walk in your sleep again, will you, Grace?"

"No, it is all settled. He has forgiven me."

Had Beverton sent her to bed now he might have spared himself a
life-long puzzle which ever baffled solution; but, with fairly good
command of himself, he yielded to curiosity, and asked:

"What had you done to him? What had he to forgive?"

Her face became convulsed; the query seemed a blow that gave her agony.
With arms extended and fingers clutching again, she tottered, but did
not fall; and he mercilessly repeated the question. She did not answer,
and he, blindly desirous of prompting her, reached for the knife on the
sideboard.

"Had it anything to do with this?" he asked.

"The scimitar," she exclaimed, hoarsely. "I killed her with it." Then
she pressed her hands to her brow, held them tightly, and her eyes
closed, while her frame stiffened visibly under the pressure. When she
removed her hands and looked at him, she seemed another person; for in
her eyes was the strange, hard expression they had worn when she had
dozed off in her chair. They lighted on the carving-knife, and before
he could move she pounced upon him and wrenched it from his hand.

"Ha," she exclaimed, in the same harsh, raspy voice as before; "and
would the señorita harm herself--or me? 'Tis a pretty plaything"--she
ran her finger along the edge--"but too sharp for the Lady Isobel.
Moorish make, I trow--we took it from the Spanish plate-ship off
Tortuga--but better fit to slay than to prod. And had ye thought, my
obstinate charmer, that when my patience is given out, it may be this
that shall slit your smooth white throat?" With a meaning and somewhat
quizzical smile at him, she laid the knife on the sideboard.

Beverton kept his nerve, remembering her recent amenability to his
suggestions.

"Who are you?" he asked, tentatively, seeking an opening for further
inquiry.

"Ha-ha," she laughed. "An idle question to ask of Hal Morgan. Are ye
so little informed of a man known to your countrymen from Madrid to
Panama?"

"And where are you?"

"Where am I? Where indeed, but in the stateroom of my Lady Isobel, who,
if I mistake not, is still intractable. We will try the water-cure, for
once more." She lifted her face to the ceiling and called: "On deck
there. A bucket o' water. Send it below by the steward."

As though the order were obeyed, she stepped to the kitchen-door, just
beyond which was the sink; and from this she lifted at arm's length--a
feat of strength impossible to her when awake--the pail of water
which always stood there. Turning toward him she swung it backward,
one hand supporting it, the other gripping the bottom edge, and would
have deluged him had he not spoken. "Wait," he said, sternly. "The
water-cure will not avail."

Her eyes wavered before his steady gaze, and she slowly lowered the
pail to the floor. For a moment it seemed that she would waken, or at
least lapse into softer mood; for her features grew composed, and her
eyes lost their glitter; but they rested on the knife, and immediately
hardened.

"Then, here's to the end o' it," she said, impatiently, and springing
forward she seized it, then with another bound sidewise, she reached
Beverton and plunged the knife in his shoulder.

It was done so swiftly that he had not time to dodge, and he sank,
weak and nerveless under the blow, the knife slipping from her hand
and remaining in the wound. Looking up with failing eyes, he beheld
her standing with arms listless by her side, the tension gone from her
face, and her gaze wandering mildly about the room.

"Grace," he gasped, "you've killed me. Wake up!"

The last was a whisper, but she heard it; and Beverton's last
remembrance before he fainted was of her piercing scream as she wakened
and looked down upon him.

       *       *       *       *       *

She had not killed him; on the contrary, though he bled copiously
until their aroused servant had summoned the doctor, he recovered
from the wound and loss of blood long before his wife recovered from
the brain-fever that followed her awakening; and it was while she was
delirious, and he convalescent enough to talk that the doctor, after
listening for an hour to her raving one day, entered the room of the
other patient, and said:

"She is past the crisis--perspiring and sound asleep, and will recover
rapidly. But, Beverton, though while delirious she was most certainly
in as subjective a condition as when self-hypnotized, yet she has not
uttered one word of a nautical or piratical nature."

"And what of that?" replied Beverton weakly, but doggedly. "According
to those books of yours"--he pointed to a pile of them at the foot of
his bed--"and I've studied them well while lying here--there are one,
two, or more sub-normal personalities within us, any one of which can
become dominant."

"Admitted; but is that a proof of reincarnation?--that the soul of your
wife once lived in the body of a pirate named Hal Morgan, and that your
soul animated the form of a beauteous maiden captured by him?"

"I can accept no other explanation. As infants we were subconscious
enemies. I drove her back farther, seeking the cause; I saw the
convulsive transition. I heard her use language she could not have
learned in this life."

The doctor smiled, and drawing a book from his pocket, said: "Then here
is something to further strengthen your belief--for a time. I took the
copy of your maidenly speech to a librarian in the city, told him what
was necessary to interest him, and he found this book for me. It is
Pyle's compilation of the lives of the buccaneers, and in Esquemeling's
account of the doings of Captain Henry Morgan is this--" He opened the
book, searched the pages, and read:

"'--but the lady, not willing to consent, or accept his presents,
showing herself like Susannah for constancy, he presently changed
his note, and addressed her in another tone, threatening a thousand
cruelties and hard usages. To all of which she gave only this resolute
and positive answer--'

"Listen now," said the doctor. "'Sir, my life is in your hands; but as
to my body, in relation to that which you would persuade me to, my soul
shall sooner be separated from it, through the violence of your arms,
than I shall condescend to your request.'"

"And what more do you want?" asked Beverton, excitedly. "The very words
I spoke; and I never saw that book."

"Wait," said the doctor, smiling. "This follows:

"'Captain Morgan, understanding this her heroic resolution, commanded
her to be stripped of the best of her apparel, and imprisoned in a
darksome, stinking cellar; here she was allowed a small quantity of
meat and drink, wherewith she had much ado to sustain life.'

"No need of reading the whole account," said the doctor, closing the
book. "This occurred in the city of Panama, which Morgan had just
captured, and the lady was never at sea with him. His men took her from
Tavoga or Tagovilla, and he released her on the march from Panama to
the coast. He did not kill her."

"Then why should I hate her as a baby?"

"I do not know. Children have strange antipathies, and while very young
are much in the subjective state."

"But the sailor talk; where did she get it? Where did I get that
quotation you just read?"

"Telepathy," said the doctor. "It is the subconscious mind which
projects and reads thoughts. You were both subjective from an inherent
tendency and the influence of that shiny knife on the wall. Your fear
of punishment and bedtime prayers were a strong auto-suggestion against
somnambulism; but the knife overcame it in your case, and your wife
never met with any deterrent influence whatever. Now, Beverton, one of
you--it makes no difference which--has read the mind of the other, and
this one has read the mind of some strong, projective personality--some
man or woman thoroughly enthused and interested in the history of the
seventeenth-century pirates--some one who has lately read this book,
and other accounts of Morgan's adventures."

"And the scimitar-like shape of the knife--the sea-story by Cooper?"

"Coincidences, both of them--and suggestions."

Beverton was silent a few moments, then said with a weary sigh: "I
cannot convince myself. I wish I could. It is strong evidence, as you
say, toward telepathy, but does not disprove reincarnation. How did she
find that knife in the snow? It was dark. I did not know where it fell."

"Your subconscious mind knew. So did hers. It was merely clairvoyance."

The doctor rose. "It does not disprove, I admit, Beverton," he said;
"and if you must know, you can only learn by experimenting farther. The
knife, fork, and steel are at the bottom of the river, as you directed.
But you can hypnotize her by other means."

"Not for the world," said Beverton. "I guess I'll wait until she walks
in her sleep again, if I experiment any more."

But Mrs. Beverton never accommodated him; neither would she have a
pointed knife in the house, nor permit her eyes to more than merely
rest upon anything bright for the rest of her life.