On went the wondrous tale, with no further interruption from Sir Mortimer, who sat at the head of the table, playing the part of host to Captain Robert Baldry, listening with cold patience to the adventurer’s rhodomontade.  When spurred by wine there was wont to awaken in Baldry a certain mordant humor, a rough wit, making straight for the mark and clanging harshly against an adversary’s shield, a lurid fancy dully illuminating the subject he had in hand.  The wild story that he was telling caught the attention of the more thoughtless sort at table; they leaned forward, encouraging him from flight to flight, laughing at each sally of boatswain’s wit, ejaculating admiration when the Star and her Captain fairly left the realm of the natural.  One splendid lie followed another, until Baldry was caught by his own words, and saw himself thus, and thus, and thus!—­a sea-dog confessed, a gatherer of riches, a dealer of death from the poop of the Star!  In his mind’s eye the lost bark swelled to a phantom ship, gigantic, terrible, wrapped with the mist of the sea; while he himself—­ah! he himself—­

     “He struck the mainmast with his hand,
     The foremast with his knee—­”

All that he had been and all that he had done, if man were only something more than man, if devil’s luck and devil’s power would come to his whistle, if the seed of his nature could defy the iron stricture of the flesh, reaching its height, shooting up into a terrible upas-tree—­so for the moment Baldry saw himself.  Into his voice came a deep and sonorous note, his black eyes glowed; he began to gesture with his hand, stately as a Spaniard.  And then, chancing to glance towards the head of the board, he met the eyes of the man who sat there, his Captain now, whom he must follow!  What might he read in their depths?  Half-scornful amusement, perhaps, and the contempt of the man who has done what man may do for the yoke-fellow who habitually made claim to supernatural prowess; in addition to the scholar’s condemnation of blatant ignorance, the courtier’s dislike of unmannerliness, the soldier’s scorn of unproved deeds, athwart all the philosophic smile!  Baldry, flushing darkly, hated with all his wild might, for that he chose to hate, the man who sat so quietly there, who held with so much ease the knowledge that by right of much beside his commission he was leader of every man within those floating walls.  The Captain of the Star struck the table with his hand.

“Ah, I had good help that time!  My brother sailed with me—­Thomas Baldry, that was master of the Speedwell that went down at Fayal in the Azores....  Didst ever see a ghost, Sir Mortimer Ferne?”

“No,” answered Ferne, curtly.

“Then the dead come not to haunt us,” said Baldry.  “I would have sworn a many had passed before your eyes.  Now had I been Thomas Baldry I would have won back.”

“That also?” demanded Sir Mortimer.  His tone was of simple wonder, and there went round the board a laugh for Baldry’s boasting.  That adventurer started to his feet, his eyes, that were black, deep-set, and very bright, fixed upon Ferne.