g to an animal grazing pasture-grass at night and ever
grazing nearer.

"It chanced I was holding a boat-stretcher in my hand--to catch what
little dew might fall upon it. I did not know who it was, but when he
lapped across the line and moaned and whimpered as he licked up my
precious drops of dew, I struck out. The boat-stretcher caught him
fairly on the nose--it was the bo's'n--and the mutiny began. It was the
bo's'n's knife that sliced down my face and sliced away my fingers. The
third officer, the eighteen-year-old lad, fought well beside me, and
saved me, so that, just before I fainted, he and I, between us, hove the
bo's'n's carcass overside."

A shifting of feet and changing of positions of those in the cabin
plunged Daughtry back into his polishing, which he had for the time
forgotten. And, as he rubbed the brass-work, he told himself under his
breath: "The old party's sure been through the mill. Such things just
got to happen."

"No," the Ancient Mariner was continuing, in his thin falsetto, in reply
to a query. "It wasn't the wounds that made me faint. It was the
exertion I made in the struggle. I was too weak. No; so little moisture
was there in my system that I didn't bleed much. And the amazing thing,
under the circumstances, was the quickness with which I healed. The
second officer sewed me up next day with a needle he'd made out of an
ivory toothpick and with twine he twisted out of the threads from a
frayed tarpaulin."

"Might I ask, Mr. Greenleaf, if there were rings at the time on the
fingers that were cut off?" Daughtry heard Simon Nishikanta ask.

"Yes, and one beauty. I found it afterward in the boat bottom and
presented it to the sandalwood trader who rescued me. It was a large
diamond. I paid one hundred and eighty guineas for it to an English
sailor in the Barbadoes. He'd stolen it, and of course it was worth
more. It was a beautiful gem. The sandalwood man did not merely save my
life for it. In addition, he spent fully a hundred pounds in outfitting
me and buying me a passage from Thursday Island to Shanghai."

* * * * *

"There's no getting away from them rings he wears," Daughtry overheard
Simon Nishikanta that evening telling Grimshaw in the dark on the weather
poop. "You don't see that kind nowadays. They're old, real old. They're
not men's rings so much as what you'd call, in the old-fashioned days,
gentlemen's rings. Real gentlemen, I mean, grand gentlemen,