st you never look at it
again."

"I am looking," I replied; "it is life to me."

"If," he continued, very thoughtful, "you, who have years with you,
should live when I go under, you'll take this belt I'm wearing off me;
it'll help you ashore. If it happen that I live with you, it'll help
both of us."

"We're in the track of steamers," said I; "there's no reason to look at
it that way yet. Please God, we'll be seen."

"That's your way, and the right one," he answered; "but I'm not a man
like that, and my heart's gone with my ship: we shall never see her
like again."

"You built her?" I said questioningly.

"Yes," he responded. "I built her when I put my hand against the world,
and, if it happened to me to go through it again, I'd do the same."

"What did you go through?" I asked, as he passed me the biscuits and
the cup with liquor in it, and as he sat up in the raft I saw that the
man had death written on his face.

But at that time he told me nothing in answer to my question; and sat
for many hours motionless, his glassy eyes fixed upon the bottom of the
boat. In the afternoon, however, he suddenly sat up, and took up his
thread as if he had broken it but a minute before.

"I went through much," said he, gazing over the mirror-like surface of
the trackless water-desert, "as boy and man. I lived a life which was
hell; God knows it."

I did not press him to tell me more, for in truth I shivered so and was
so numbed that even my curiosity to know of this life of crime and of
mystery was not so paramount as to banish that other thought: Shall we
live when the sun sinks this night? But he found relief in his talk,
and, as the liquor warmed him, he continued faster than before--

"I was a stepson, boy; bound to a brute with not as much conscience as
a big dog, and no more human nature in him than a wild bull. My mother
died three months after he took her, and I'm not going to speak about
her, God help me; but if I had the man under my hands that treated her
so, I'd crush his skull like I crush this biscuit. Well, that ain't my
tale; you ask me what I went through, and I'm trying to tell you. Have
you ever wanted a meal? No, I reckon not; and you can't get it in your
mind to know what living on bones and bits for more than a couple of
years means, can you, as I lived down in my home at Glasgow, and often
since out West and at Colorado? I'd come out from Scotland as a bit of
a lad not turned thirteen, and I saile