“When we sighted Java Head I had had time to think all those matters out several times over.  I had six weeks of doing nothing else, and with only an hour or so every evening for a tramp on the quarter-deck.”

He whispered, his arms folded on the side of my bed-place, staring through the open port.  And I could imagine perfectly the manner of this thinking out—­a stubborn if not a steadfast operation; something of which I should have been perfectly incapable.

“I reckoned it would be dark before we closed with the land,” he continued, so low that I had to strain my hearing, near as we were to each other, shoulder touching shoulder almost.  “So I asked to speak to the old man.  He always seemed very sick when he came to see me—­as if he could not look me in the face.  You know, that foresail saved the ship.  She was too deep to have run long under bare poles.  And it was I that managed to set it for him.  Anyway, he came.  When I had him in my cabin—­he stood by the door looking at me as if I had the halter round my neck already—­I asked him right away to leave my cabin door unlocked at night while the ship was going through Sunda Straits.  There would be the Java coast within two or three miles, off Angier Point.  I wanted nothing more.  I’ve had a prize for swimming my second year in the Conway.”

“I can believe it,” I breathed out.

“God only knows why they locked me in every night.  To see some of their faces you’d have thought they were afraid I’d go about at night strangling people.  Am I a murdering brute?  Do I look it?  By Jove! if I had been he wouldn’t have trusted himself like that into my room.  You’ll say I might have chucked him aside and bolted out, there and then—­it was dark already.  Well, no.  And for the same reason I wouldn’t think of trying to smash the door.  There would have been a rush to stop me at the noise, and I did not mean to get into a confounded scrimmage.  Somebody else might have got killed—­for I would not have broken out only to get chucked back, and I did not want any more of that work.  He refused, looking more sick than ever.  He was afraid of the men, and also of that old second mate of his who had been sailing with him for years—­a grey-headed old humbug; and his steward, too, had been with him devil knows how long—­seventeen years or more—­a dogmatic sort of loafer who hated me like poison, just because I was the chief mate.  No chief mate ever made more than one voyage in the Sephora, you know.  Those two old chaps ran the ship.  Devil only knows what the skipper wasn’t afraid of (all his nerve went to pieces altogether in that hellish spell of bad weather we had)—­of what the law would do to him—­of his wife, perhaps.  Oh, yes! she’s on board.  Though I don’t think she would have meddled.  She would have been only too glad to have me out of the ship in any way.  The ‘brand of Cain’ business, don’t you see.  That’s all right.  I was