a sound like an iron bedstead being
knocked about, and the low angry growling of some large animal.
At the same time the man spoke. He repeated his question,--"How do you
feel now?"

I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I
had got there. He must have seen the question in my face,
for my voice was inaccessible to me.

"You were picked up in a boat, starving. The name on the boat
was the 'Lady Vain,' and there were spots of blood on the gunwale."

At the same time my eye caught my hand, so thin that it looked
like a dirty skin-purse full of loose bones, and all the business
of the boat came back to me.

"Have some of this," said he, and gave me a dose of some
scarlet stuff, iced.

It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.

"You were in luck," said he, "to get picked up by a ship with a
medical man aboard." He spoke with a slobbering articulation,
with the ghost of a lisp.

"What ship is this?" I said slowly, hoarse from my long silence.

"It's a little trader from Arica and Callao. I never asked
where she came from in the beginning,--out of the land
of born fools, I guess. I'm a passenger myself, from Arica.
The silly ass who owns her,--he's captain too, named Davies,--he's
lost his certificate, or something. You know the kind of man,--calls
the thing the 'Ipecacuanha,' of all silly, infernal names;
though when there's much of a sea without any wind, she certainly
acts according."

(Then the noise overhead began again, a snarling growl
and the voice of a human being together. Then another voice,
telling some "Heaven-forsaken idiot" to desist.)

"You were nearly dead," said my interlocutor. "It was a very
near thing, indeed. But I've put some stuff into you now.
Notice your arm's sore? Injections. You've been insensible for nearly
thirty hours."

I thought slowly. (I was distracted now by the yelping of a number
of dogs.) "Am I eligible for solid food?" I asked.

"Thanks to me," he said. "Even now the mutton is boiling."

"Yes," I said with assurance; "I could eat some mutton."

"But," said he with a momentary hesitation, "you know I'm dying to hear
of how you came to be alone in that boat. Damn that howling!"
I thought I detected a certain suspicion in his eyes.

He suddenly left the cabin, and I heard him in violent controversy
with some one, who seemed to me to talk gibberish in response to him.
The matter sounded as though it ended in blows, but in that