e learns who he is.

Let me tell how I have discovered all this. It was last night, shortly
before midnight, when I came up on the poop to enjoy a whiff of the south-
east trades in which we are now bowling along, close-hauled in order to
weather Cape San Roque. Mr. Pike had the watch, and I paced up and down
with him while he told me old pages of his life. He has often done this,
when not "sea-grouched," and often he has mentioned with pride--yes, with
reverence--a master with whom he sailed five years. "Old Captain
Somers," he called him--"the finest, squarest, noblest man I ever sailed
under, sir."

Well, last night our talk turned on lugubrious subjects, and Mr. Pike,
wicked old man that he is, descanted on the wickedness of the world and
on the wickedness of the man who had murdered Captain Somers.

"He was an old man, over seventy years old," Mr. Pike went on. "And they
say he'd got a touch of palsy--I hadn't seen him for years. You see, I'd
had to clear out from the coast because of trouble. And that devil of a
second mate caught him in bed late at night and beat him to death. It
was terrible. They told me about it. Right in San Francisco, on board
the _Jason Harrison_, it happened, eleven years ago.

"And do you know what they did? First, they gave the murderer life, when
he should have been hanged. His plea was insanity, from having had his
head chopped open a long time before by a crazy sea-cook. And when he'd
served seven years the governor pardoned him. He wasn't any good, but
his people were a powerful old Virginian family, the Walthams--I guess
you've heard of them--and they brought all kinds of pressure to bear. His
name was Sidney Waltham."

At this moment the warning bell, a single stroke fifteen minutes before
the change of watch, rang out from the wheel and was repeated by the look-
out on the forecastle head. Mr. Pike, under his stress of feeling, had
stopped walking, and we stood at the break of the poop. As chance would
have it, Mr. Mellaire was a quarter of an hour ahead of time, and he
climbed the poop-ladder and stood beside us while the mate concluded his
tale.

"I didn't mind it," Mr. Pike continued, "as long as he'd got life and was
serving his time. But when they pardoned him out after only seven years
I swore I'd get him. And I will. I don't believe in God or devil, and
it's a rotten crazy world anyway; but I do believe in hunches. And I
know I'm going to get him.