shipmaster."

He was densely distressed--and perhaps I should have sympathized with
him if I had been able to detach my mental vision from the unsuspected
sharer of my cabin as though he were my second self. There he was on the
other side of the bulkhead, four or five feet from us, no more, as we
sat in the saloon. I looked politely at Captain Archbold (if that was
his name), but it was the other I saw, in a gray sleeping suit, seated
on a low stool, his bare feet close together, his arms folded, and every
word said between us falling into the ears of his dark head bowed on his
chest.

"I have been at sea now, man and boy, for seven-and-thirty years, and
I've never heard of such a thing happening in an English ship. And that
it should be my ship. Wife on board, too."

I was hardly listening to him.

"Don't you think," I said, "that the heavy sea which, you told me, came
aboard just then might have killed the man? I have seen the sheer weight
of a sea kill a man very neatly, by simply breaking his neck."

"Good God!" he uttered, impressively, fixing his smeary blue eyes on
me. "The sea! No man killed by the sea ever looked like that." He seemed
positively scandalized at my suggestion. And as I gazed at him certainly
not prepared for anything original on his part, he advanced his head
close to mine and thrust his tongue out at me so suddenly that I
couldn't help starting back.

After scoring over my calmness in this graphic way he nodded wisely. If