s.
"I knew you wouldn't believe it when I started. You _couldn't_. It would
be a kind of blasphemy against the sacred institution of pavements.
You're too damn smug, Ridgeway. I can't shake you. You haven't sat two
days and two nights, keeping your eyes open by sheer teeth-gritting,
until they got used to it and wouldn't shut any more. When I tell you
I found that yellow thing snooping around the davits, and three bights
of the boat-fall loosened out, plain on deck--you grin behind your
collar. When I tell you she padded off forward and evaporated--flickered
back to hell and hasn't been seen since, then--why, you explain to
yourself that I'm drunk. I tell you--" He jerked his head back abruptly
and turned to face the companionway, his lips still apart. He listened
so for a moment, then he shook himself out of it and went on:

"I tell you, Ridgeway, I've been over this hulk with a foot-rule.
There's not a cubic inch I haven't accounted for, not a plank I--"

This time he got up and moved a step toward the companion, where he
stood with his head bent forward and slightly to the side. After what
might have been twenty seconds of this he whispered, "Do you hear?"

Far and far away down the reach a ferry-boat lifted its infinitesimal
wail, and then the silence of the night river came down once more,
profound and inscrutable A corner of the wick above my head sputtered
a little--that was all.

"Hear what?" I whispered back. He lifted a cautious finger toward the
opening.

"Somebody. Listen."

The man's faculties must have been keyed up to the pitch of his nerves,
for to me the night remained as voiceless as a subterranean cavern. I
became intensely irritated with him; within my mind I cried out against
this infatuated pantomime of his. And then, of a sudden, there _was_ a
sound--the dying rumor of a ripple, somewhere in the outside darkness,
as though an object had been let into the water with extreme care.

"You heard?"

I nodded. The ticking of the watch in my vest pocket came to my ears,
shucking off the leisurely seconds, while McCord's fingernails gnawed
at the palms of his hands. The man was really sick. He wheeled on me
and cried out, "My God! Ridgeway--why don't we go out?"

I, for one, refused to be a fool. I passed him and climbed out of the
opening; he followed far enough to lean his elbows on the hatch, his
feet and legs still within the secure glow of the cabin.

"You see, there's nothing." My wave of