rom so fearful an injury?" I questioned.
"There must have been a splendid surgeon on board, and you must have had
wonderful vitality."

He shook his head.

"It must have been the vitality . . . and the molasses."

"Molasses!"

"Yes; the captain had old-fashioned prejudices against antiseptics. He
always used molasses for fresh wound-dressings. I lay in my bunk many
weary weeks--we had a long passage--and by the time we reached Hong Kong
the thing was healed, there was no need for a shore surgeon, and I was
standing my third mate's watch--we carried third mates in those days."

Not for many a long day was I to realize the dire part that scar in Mr.
Mellaire's head was to play in his destiny and in the destiny of the
_Elsinore_. Had I known at the time, Captain West would have received
the most unusual awakening from sleep that he ever experienced; for he
would have been routed out by a very determined, partially-dressed
passenger with a proposition capable of going to the extent of buying the
_Elsinore_ outright with all her cargo, so that she might be sailed
straight back to Baltimore.

As it was, I merely thought it a very marvellous thing that Mr. Mellaire
should have lived so many years with such a hole in his head.

We talked on, and he gave me many details of that particular happening,
and of other happenings at sea on the part of the lunatics that seem to
infest the sea.

And yet I could not like the man. In nothing he said, nor in the manner
of saying things, could I find fault. He seemed generous, broad-minded,
and, for a sailor, very much of a man of the world. It was easy for me
to overlook his excessive suavity of speech and super-courtesy of social
mannerism. It was not that. But all the time I was distressingly, and,
I suppose, intuitively aware, though in the darkness I couldn't even see
his eyes, that there, behind those eyes, inside that skull, was
ambuscaded an alien personality that spied upon me, measured me, studied
me, and that said one thing while it thought another thing.

When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that I had
been talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature. The
other half had not spoken. Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and quick,
behind the mask of words and flesh.

CHAPTER XI

But I could not sleep. I took more cream of tartar. It must be the heat
of the bed-clothes, I decided, that excited my hives. And yet, w