but
when he saw that I was unmoved, he fell quiet again, and wiping his
forehead, where the sweat had gathered thickly, he said in a low,
coaxing voice--

"Don't compel me, lad, to do what I have meant not to do. You're here
for good or ill, and if you wish to keep your life, put a control on
your tongue. These men are nothing to you; they're lazy hogs that the
world's well rid of--let 'em die, and save your own carcass. You've
been here days now--the first man that ever lived among us without
signing our papers. But you can't stay that way any longer. You know
this business. You've a straight notion that my hand's agen Europe,
and, for the matter of that, agen the world, too; those that share with
me shall swing with me, and if I burn when it's done, by the devil
himself they shall burn too. It isn't of my asking that you're amongst
us, or that you took up the work of the hound Hall, who put the first
nail in his coffin that night he came to my bed at Spezia. I saw him
there, though he thought me sleeping; and that night I wrote death
against his name, as I wrote it against yours when you entered my room
in Paris. There's reasons why I've broken my word in your case, though
you'll never know 'em; but there's no reason why you shouldn't swear to
go through it with me and mine, man for man, life with life, be it
rope's-end or bullet, to rot among the fish, or to share every mate
among us what's got upon the sea. That's my question, and you'll answer
it now, yes or no, plain word and no shuffle; meaning to you whether
you go on as you've gone on in the past, or freeze amongst the others
lying up there in the cavern; whether you swim in money, as my lot swim
in it, or get bullets in you thick as hail from northward. That's my
question, I say again, and there's my papers. Sign 'em now, or you lie
a corpse before an hour on the clock."

He leant over his writing-table and put the paper into my hands, a
rough sheet of parchment, which he wished me to read. But my eyes were
dimmed with the restless excitement of the situation, with the dread
terror of the alternative put to me; and I saw nothing but lines of
writing which swam before me. The silence of the room was terrible to
bear; and it was as though I struggled for life while already in the
tomb. My thoughts went hurriedly to Europe, to my home, to my friends;
above all I recalled the night when Martin Hall went to his death, and
his shadow seemed by me, his face beseech