Captain," he suggested, with a politeness that was
almost impertinence. "We'll have a cozy hour or two out of this tedious
wait for the tide to lift you off."

I contemplated him helplessly. There was no alternative but to fall in
with whatever mad caprice might seize his brain. If I opposed him, it
would lead to high and querulous words; and the hideous fact of his
presence there--of his mere existence--I was bound to conceal at all
hazards.

"I must ask you to keep quiet," I said, stiffly.

"As a tomb," he agreed, and his eyes twinkled disagreeably in the
darkness. "You forget that I am supposed to be in one."

I went stealthily down into the cabin, where I secured a box of cigars
and the first couple of bottles that my hands laid hold of in the
locker. They proved to contain an old Tokay wine which I had treasured
for several years to no particular purpose. The ancient bottles clinked
heavily in my grasp as I mounted again to the deck.

"Now this is something like," he purred, watching like a cat my every
motion as I set the glasses forth and guardedly drew the cork. He
saluted me with a flourish and drank.

To an onlooker that pantomime in the darkness would have seemed utterly
grotesque. I tasted the fragrant, heavy wine and waited--waited in an
agony of suspense--my ears strained desperately to catch the least sound
from below. But a profound silence enveloped the schooner, broken only
by the occasional rhythmic snore of the mate.

"You seem rather ill at ease," Farquharson observed from the depths of
the deck chair when he had his cigar comfortably aglow. "I trust it
isn't this little impromptu call of mine that's disturbing you. After
all, life has its unusual moments, and this, I think, is one of them."
He sniffed the bouquet of his wine and drank. "It is rare moments like
this--bizarre, incredible, what you like--that compensate for the tedium
of years."

His disengaged hand had fallen to the side of the chair, and I now
observed in dismay that a scarf belonging to Joyce's wife had been left
lying in the chair, and that his fingers were absently twisting the
silken fringe.

"I wonder that you stick it out, as you do, on this island," I forced
myself to observe, seeking safety in the commonplace, while my eyes, as
if fascinated, watched his fingers toying with the ends of the scarf. I
was forced to accept the innuendo beneath his enigmatic utterances. His
utter baseness and depravity, born perhaps of