sked.

"I believe that's what they call it," said Raff gruffly.

"Beg pardon, sir," put in Sutton very quietly, "but we'll notify no
office and no doctor either--not till we sheer have to."...

The mate was planted by the door where he had been waiting in silence
while we two ministered to the chief. Raff had ignored him since our
return, but he eyed him now sternly up and down. Most people would have
eyed him so, for he made rather an appalling figure, streaked and
stained, with his wounds half dried upon him, a raking cut along one
cheek and his coat hanging in shreds.

"What in Hull t' Halifax are you talkin' about?"

Sutton drew from his pocket a certain familiar object, a small,
black-bound volume. "There was a chap in a book I read, sir--"

The captain regarded him, purpling.

"Is this more of your wonderful notions?"

"It's my plan to save Chris Wickwire," returned the mate firmly, "and
I'm bound to try it on. Just as it says here. 'Sirs,' it says, 'sirs, I
will practice on this drunken man--'"

He held out the shabby octavo and, considering it again with heightened
amazement, of a sudden I knew where I had seen it before.

"Why," I cried, "that's the Book you got for the chief. I can tell from
the gilt cross on the cover. That's Wickwire's Bible!"

"It is the book I got for the chief," he said slowly, making plain the
case against himself, "and it has a cross on the cover. But it's no
Bible. Only an old collection of plays I bought to gammon him with.
Shakespeare wrote it.

"There was no cover to it either, so I bought an old cover off a hymn
book and pasted it over. You can see for yourselves--the cross is upside
down." And, in fact, that we might miss nothing he showed us the cover,
wrong way with the pages. "I remember the chief, taking lessons from me
but having only the cross to go by, d'y'see--the chief used always to
hold the book wrong side up. I remember," he added with an odd smile,
quite mirthless--"I remember how I laughed. I used to think it funny."

Someway that made the captain froth. Since our invasion of Colootullah
he had been increasingly rigid toward the mate, and here he broke out.

"So we've had nothin' but your damn' lyin' tricks from the start! All
the time you was readin' to him--"

"Only gammon, sir. I used to experiment on him with choice bits--calling
'em truth and Scripture."

"And now you're after more fool games of the same kind! Can't you look
what's come of 'em