there showed the light of Mr. Fant's window, where he lay in his
bunk, relaxing his grisly official personality with a book and a
cigar.

In deft haste Goodwin stepped to the fore side of the fo'c'sle, where
he would be hidden should the watchman take a fancy to look out of
his galley. In him a single emotion was constant: he had a need to
find Tom Mowbray. It was more than an idea or a passion: it was like
the craving of a drug maniac for his poison. The shore that blinked
at him across the black waters was not inaccessible under the impulse
of that lust of anger; he was at all times a strong swimmer. Under
shelter of the deckhouse he stripped his clothes and made of them it
was only his shirt and trousers a bundle which the belt that carried
his sheath-knife fastened upon his head, descending under his chin
like a helmet-strap. With infinite precaution to be unheard he went
in this trim across the deck to the rail.

The Etna's chain-plates were broad as a frigate's; he had but to let
himself down carefully and he was in the water without a splash. A
dozen strokes took him clear of her, and presently he paused,
up-ending and treading water, to look back at her. She stood up over
her anchors like a piece of architecture, poising like a tower; the
sailor in him paid tribute to the builders who had conceived her
beauty. They had devised a ship: it needed Mr. Fant and his
colleagues to degrade her into a sea-going prophet and give aptness
to her by-name of "Hell-packet." He was clear of her now; he might
fail to reach the shore and drown, but at least the grey woman aft
would never see his humiliation and defeat. He turned over, setting
his face to the waterside lights of the city, and struck out.

It was a long swim, and it was fortunate for him that he took the
water on the turn of the tide, so that where the tail of the ebb set
him down the first of the flood bore him back. The stimulus of the
chill and the labor of swimming cleared the poison from his body and
brain; he swam steadily, with eyes fixed on the lights beading the
waterside and mind clenched on the single purpose to find Tom
Mowbray, to deal with him, to satisfy the anger which ached in him
like a starved appetite. How he would handle him, what he would do
with him, when he found him, did not occupy his thoughts; it was a
purpose and not a plan which was taking him ashore. He had the man's
pursy large face for ever in his consciousness; the vision of it