ation to slumber
that he decided to go to bed forthwith. He lit his pipe and sat down
on his bed to take his boots off. He had one boot unlaced but still
on his foot when his pipe dropped from his lips. Across his drugged
and failing brain there flickered for an instant the blurred shape of
a suspicion.

"What's the matter with me?" he half cried; and tried to rise to his
feet.

He knew he had failed to stand up and had fallen back on the bed.
With his last faculties he resisted the tides of darkness that rushed
in upon him; then his grasp upon consciousness loosened and his face,
which had been knitted in effort, relaxed. When half an hour later
Tom Mowbray and two of his "runners" came to find him, he lay,
scarcely breathing, in the appearance of a profound and natural
sleep.

It was thirty-six hours later when a vague consciousness of pain,
growing upon his poisoned nerves, sharpened to a climax, and he
opened his eyes, lying where he found himself without moving. It took
him some minutes before he brought his mind into co-ordination with
his senses to realize what he saw. Then it was plain to him that he
was lying upon the bare slats of a bunk in the narrow forecastle of a
ship. Its door, hooked open, made visible a slice of sunlit deck and
a wooden rail beyond it, from which the gear of the foremast slanted
up. Within the forecastle only three of the bunks contained
mattresses and blankets, and there was no heave and sway under him to
betoken a ship under sail in a seaway.

Slowly the sailor within him asserted itself. "This hooker's at
anchor!"

By degrees he began to account for himself. Recollection returned: he
had waked in a bare and bedless bunk, but it was at Tom Mowbray's he
had fallen asleep. He remembered going up to his room and the
sleepiness that had pressed itself upon him there. And there was a
thought, a doubt, that had been with him at the last. It eluded him
for a moment; then he remembered and sat up, in an access of vigor
and anger as he recalled it.

"Knock-out drops," he said. "Yes, by God! Tom Mowbray's shanghaied
me!"

His head ached, his skin and his mouth were parched as if by a fever.
Stiffly he swung himself over the edge of his bunk and went on feet
that were numb and uncertain through the door to the deck. He was
sore all over from lying on the bare slats of the bunk, and the dregs
of the drug still clogged his mind and muscles; but like the flame in
a foul lantern there bu