Bertha' with those papers, son," ordered Kitchell;
"I'll bide here and dig up sh' mor' loot. I'll gut this ole pill-box
from stern to stem-post 'fore I'll leave. I won't leave a copper rivet
in 'er, notta co'er rivet, dyhear?" he shouted, his face purple with
unnecessary rage.

Wilbur returned to the schooner with the two Chinamen, leaving Kitchell
alone on the bark. He found the girl sitting by the rudderhead almost as
he had left her, looking about her with vague, unseeing eyes.

"You name is Moran, isn't it?" he asked. "Moran Sternersen."

"Yes," she said, after a pause, then looked curiously at a bit of tarred
rope on the deck. Nothing more could be got out of her. Wilbur talked
to her at length, and tried to make her understand the situation, but it
was evident she did not follow. However, at each mention of her name she
would answer:

"Yes, yes, I'm Moran."

Wilbur turned away from her, biting his nether lip in perplexity.

"Now, what am I going to do?" he muttered. "What a situation! If I tell
the Captain, it's all up with the girl. If he didn't kill her, he'd do
worse--might do both. If I don't tell him, there goes her birthright,
$60,000, and she alone in the world. It's begun to go already," he
added, listening to the sounds that came from the bark. Kitchell was
raging to and fro in the cabin in a frenzy of drink, axe in hand,
smashing glassware, hacking into the wood-work, singing the while at the
top of his voice:

"As through the drop I go, drop I go,
As through the drop I go, drop I go,
As through the drop I go,
Down to hell that yawns below,
Twenty stiffs all in a row
Damn your eyes"

"That's the kind of man I have to deal with," muttered Wilbur. "It's
encouraging, and there's no one to talk to. Not much help in a Chinaman
and a crazy girl in a man's oilskins. It's about the biggest situation
you ever faced, Ross Wilbur, and you're all alone. What the devil are
you going to do?"

He acknowledged with considerable humiliation that he could not get the
better of Kitchell, either physically or mentally. Kitchell was a more
powerful man than he, and cleverer. The Captain was in his element now,
and he was the commander. On shore it would have been vastly different.
The city-bred fellow, with a policeman always in call, would have known
how to act.

"I simply can't stand by and see that hog plundering everything she's
got. What's to be done?"

And sudden