a diseased mind, I could
understand. I had led him to bait a trap with the fiction of his own
death, but he could not know that it had been already sprung upon his
unsuspecting victims.

He seemed to regard me with contemptuous pity. "Naturally, you wonder. A
mere skipper like yourself fails to understand--many things. What can
you know of life cooped up in this schooner? You touch only the surface
of things just as this confounded boat of yours skims only the top of
the water. Once in a lifetime you may come to real grips with
life--strike bottom, eh?--as your schooner has done now. Then you're
aground and quite helpless. What a pity!"

He lifted his glass and drank it off, then thrust it out to be refilled.
"Life as the world lives it--bah!" he dismissed it with the scorn of one
who counts himself divested of all illusions. "Life would be an infernal
bore if it were not for its paradoxes. Now you, Captain Barnaby, would
never dream that in becoming dead to the world--in other people's
belief--I have become intensely alive. There are opened up infinite
possibilities----"

He drank again and eyed me darkly, and then went on in his crack-brained
way, "What is life but a challenge to pretense, a constant exercise in
duplicity, with so few that come to master it as an art? Every one goes
about with something locked deep in his heart. Take yourself, Captain
Barnaby. You have your secrets--hidden from me, from all the
world--which, if they could be dragged out of you----"

His deep-set eyes bored through the darkness upon me. Hunched up in the
deck chair, with his legs crossed under him, he was like an animated
Buddha venting a dark philosophy and seeking to undermine my mental
balance with his sophistry.

"I'm a plain man of the sea," I rejoined, bluntly. "I take life as it
comes."

He smiled derisively, drained his glass, and held it out again. "But you
have your secrets, rather clumsily guarded, to be sure----"

"What secrets?" I cried out, goaded almost beyond endurance.

He seemed to deprecate the vigor of my retort and lifted a cautioning
hand. "Do you want every one on board to hear this conversation?"

At that moment the smoke-wrapped cone of Lakalatcha was cleft by a sheet
of flame, and we confronted each other in a sort of blood-red dawn.

"There is no reason why we should quarrel," he went on, after darkness
had enveloped us again. "But there are times which call for plain
speaking. Major Stanleigh is