sit knitting in
her chair by the mizzen fife-rail while at the break of the poop a
miserable man was being trodden and beaten out of the likeness of
humanity and never lift her head nor shift her attitude for all his
cries and struggles. It was her presence aboard that touched the
man-slaughtering Etna with her quality of the macabre.

"But she won't see me broken up," swore Goodwin to himself as her
head vanished in the hood of the companion. "No not if I've got to
set the damn ship alight!"

He made the acquaintance, when work was over for the day, of his
fellows in ill-fortune, the owners of the three occupied bunks in the
forecastle. As if the Etna had laid herself out to starve him of
every means of comfort, they proved to be "Dutchmen" that is to say,
Teutons of one nationality or another and therefore, by sea-canons,
his inferiors, incapable of sharing his feelings and not to be
trusted with his purpose. One question, however, they were able to
answer satisfactorily. It had occurred to him that since even Tom
Mowbray could only get men for the Etna by drugging them, her
officers would probably take special precautions to guard against
desertion.

"Do they lock us in here at night?" he asked of the three of them
when they sat at supper in the port fo'c'sle.

They stared at him uncomprehendingly. For them, helots of the sea,
the Etna's terrors were nothing out of the way; all ships used them
harshly; life itself was harsh enough. Their bland blond faces were
stupid and amiable.

"Log us in!" answered one of them. "No! For what shall they log us
in?"

"That's all right, then," said Goodwin and let them continue to stare
at him, ruminating his reasons for the question.

There was a fourth "Dutchman" who slumbered through the day in the
starboard fo'c'sle and sat all night in the galley, in the exercise
of his functions as night-watchman. His lamp shed a path of light
from the galley door to the rail when, his fellows in the fo'c'sle
being, audibly asleep, Goodwin rose from his bunk and came forth to
the deck. Far away, across the level waters of the great bay, the
lights of the city made an illumination against the background of the
night; overhead there was a sky bold with stars; the Etna floated
mute in a rustle of moving waters. There were no ships near her; only
now and again a towboat racing up from the Golden Gates went by with
the noise of a breaking wave on a steep shore. In the break of the
poop