yes; it was a duel between us.

"I won't swear," he said. "You had your face blacked, and didn't wear a
beard."

A soft growth of hair had come out over my cheeks whilst I lay in
prison. I rubbed my hand against it, and thought that he had drawn first
blood.

"You must not say 'you,'" I said. "I swear I was not the man. Did he
talk like me?"

"Can't say that he did," Sadler answered, moving from one foot to the
other.

"Had he got eyes like me, or a nose, or a mouth?"

"Can't say," he answered again. "His face was blacked."

"Didn't he talk Blue Nose--in the Nova Scotian way?"

"Well, he did," Sadler assented slowly. "But any one could for a
disguise. It's as easy as..."

Beside me, the turnkey whispered suddenly, "Pull him up; stop his
mouth."

I said, "Wasn't he an older man? Didn't he look between forty and
fifty?"

"What do _you_ look like?" the chief mate asked.

"I'm twenty-four," I answered; "I can prove it."

"Well, you look forty and older," he answered negligently. "So did he."

His cool, disinterested manner overwhelmed me like the blow of an
immense wave; it proved so absolutely that I had parted with all
semblance of youth. It was something added to the immense waste of
waters between myself and Seraphina; an immense waste of years. I did
not ask much of the next witness; Sadler had made me afraid. Septimus
Hearn, the master of the _Victoria_, was a man with eyes as blue and
as cold as bits of round blue pebble; a little goat's beard, iron-gray;
apple-coloured cheeks, and small gold earrings in his ears. He had
an extraordinarily mournful voice, and a retrospective melancholy of
manner. He was just such another master of a trader as Captain Lumsden
had been, and it was the same story over again, with little different
touches, the hard blue eyes gazing far over the top of my head; the
gnarled hands moving restlessly on the rim of his hat.

"Afterwards the prisoner ordered the steward to give us a drink of
brandy. A glass was offered me, but I refused to drink it, and he said,
'Who is it that refuses to drink a glass of brandy?' He asked me what
countryman I was, and if I was an American."

There were two others from the unfortunate _Victoria_--a Thomas Davis,
boatswain, who had had one of Nikola's pistol-balls in his hip; and a
sort of steward--I have forgotten his name--who had a scar of a cutlass
wound on his forehead.

It was horrible enough; but what distressed me more was that I c