for
an image of his own youth. And yet--and yet, hearkening, I caught the
same unsteady note that had made me curious of him often and often
before. Something in him rang false. Not so much like a bell that has
cracked, if you understand me, but rather like metal whereof the alloy
was never rightly fined.

"I was off watch that evening," he went on. "Chris Wickwire wanted to go
ashore--for the first time in a year maybe. You know you generally
couldn't lift him out of the ship with a winch, and so I waited till he
should come up and step by the gangway to fix a bit of a joke on him. It
was wrong of me, and very silly, you know, and dearly I've paid for it.
But I only meant a jape, sir--to hear him rip and fuss and perhaps jolt
a proper oath out of him and make him break that everlasting clay cutty
he always wore in his face.... I fixed to loose the hand rope on the
outboard side--

"I did loose it, _you_ know I did; and then I leaned there on the rail
to laugh. He went down the steps in the dark. I figgered he'd be slid
quite neat into the shore boat waiting below, d'y'see? I heard him
stumble and call for me before I thought what I'd done. I heard him, and
I didn't go to help, but I never thought how it would be, sir, not till
too late. You believe that--!"

The cry wrenched from him as he searched our faces. It was very
necessary to him that we should believe; he had all a boy's eagerness to
keep the illusion--some illusion. And this was natural too, though even
the kid prank as he told it came to the same stark and gratuitous
horror. For Chris Wickwire had dropped out of life from that gangway!

Captain Raff chewed his cheroot for a space in silence. You would hardly
expect him to have the subtlety of a donkey engine, so to speak, but he
might surprise you at times, and he had learned to be very patient with
the mate. Perhaps in his own time he had passed some crisis when the
stuff in him was molding and setting, though it must have been quite a
different occasion with so rugged a soul.

"Well," he said carefully, "we know all that, and I never heard nobody
jaw you as hard about it as what you done yourself. But it's all right
now, ain't it? You've found him. Didn't you just say you found him
again?" And then he added what turned out to be a singular comment: "If
the chief was smokin' his ol' pipe as usual, I judge nothin' much could
ha' happened to him. He must be pretty much his own self after all."

So Sutt