fix 'em," he said vindictively. "Mebbe they
kill me, all right; but I kill some, too."

He threw back his coat, and I saw, strapped to the left side of his body,
in a canvas sheath, so that the handle was ready to hand, a meat knife of
the heavy sort that butchers hack with. He drew it forth--it was fully
two feet long--and, to demonstrate its razor-edge, sliced a sheet of
newspaper into many ribbons.

"Huh!" he laughed sardonically. "I am Chink, monkey, damn fool, eh?--no
good, eh? all rotten damn to hell. I fix 'em, they make fool with me."

And yet there is not the slightest evidence of foul play. Nobody knows
what happened to the carpenter. There are no clues, no traces. The
night was calm and snowy. No seas broke on board. Without doubt the
clumsy, big-footed, over-grown giant of a boy is overside and dead. The
question is: did he go over of his own accord, or was he put over?

At eight o'clock Mr. Pike proceeded to interrogate the watches. He stood
at the break of the poop, in the high place, leaning on the rail and
gazing down at the crew assembled on the main deck beneath him.

Man after man he questioned, and from each man came the one story. They
knew no more about it than did we--or so they averred.

"I suppose you'll be chargin' next that I hove that big lummux overboard
with me own hands," Mulligan Jacobs snarled, when he was questioned. "An'
mebbe I did, bein' that husky an' rampagin' bull-like."

The mate's face grew more forbidding and sour, but without comment he
passed on to John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum.

It was an unforgettable scene--the mate in the high place, the men,
sullen and irresponsive, grouped beneath. A gentle snow drifted straight
down through the windless air, while the _Elsinore_, with hollow thunder
from her sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so that the ocean lapped
the mouths of her scuppers with long-drawn, shuddering sucks and sobs.
And all the men swayed in unison to the rolls, their hands in mittens,
their feet in sack-wrapped sea-boots, their faces worn and sick. And the
three dreamers with the topaz eyes stood and swayed and dreamed together,
incurious of setting and situation.

And then it came--the hint of easterly air. The mate noted it first. I
saw him start and turn his cheek to the almost imperceptible draught.
Then I felt it. A minute longer he waited, until assured, when, the dead
carpenter forgotten, he burst out with orders to th