“Why, sure I do?  Why shouldn’t I mean it?  It’s true.”

None of us moved, but it was as if each of us stepped back, leaving the two men facing each other.  In this circle no one would interfere.  It was not our affair.  Our detachment isolated the two—­McHenry quite drunk, in full command of his senses but with no controlling intelligence; Ducat not at all drunk, studying the situation, considering in his rage and humiliation what would best revenge him on this man.

Ducat spoke, “McHenry, come out of this cabin with me.”

“What for?”

“Come with me.”

“Oh, all right, all right,” McHenry said.

We stepped back as they passed us.  They went up the steps to the deck.  Ducat paused at the break of the poop and stood there, speaking to McHenry.  We could not hear his words.  The schooner tossed idly, a faint creaking of the rigging came down to us in the cabin.  The same question was in every eye.  Then Ducat turned on his heel, and McHenry was left alone.

Our question was destined to remain unanswered.  Whatever Ducat had said, it was something that hushed McHenry forever.  He never mentioned the subject again, nor did any of us.  But McHenry’s attitude had subtly changed.  Ducat’s words had destroyed that last secret refuge of the soul in which every man keeps the vestiges of self-justification and self-respect.

McHenry sought me out that night while I sat on the cabin-house gazing at the great stars of the Southern Cross, and began to talk.

“Now take me,” he said, “I’m not so bad.  I’m as good as most people.  As a matter of fact, I ain’t done anything more in my life than anybody’d’ve done, if they had the chance.  Look at me—­I had a singlet an’ a pair of dungarees when I landed on the beach in T’yti, an’ look at me now!  I ain’t done so bad!”

He must have felt the unconvincing ring of his tone, lacking the full and complacent self-assurance usual to it, for as if groping for something to make good the lack he sought backward through his memories and unfolded bit by bit the tale of his experiences.  Scotch born of drunken parents, he had been reared in the slums of American cities and the forecastles of American ships.  A waif, newsboy, loafer, gang-fighter and water-front pirate, he had come into the South Seas twenty-five years earlier, shanghaied when drunk in San Francisco.  He looked back proudly on a quarter of a century of trading, thieving, selling contraband rum and opium, pearl-buying and gambling.

But this pride on which he had so long depended failed him now.  Successful fights that he had waged, profitable crimes committed, grew pale upon his tongue.  Listening in the darkness while the engine drove us through a black sea and the canvas awning flapped overhead, I felt the baffled groping behind his words.

“So I don’t take nothing from no man!” he boasted, and fell into uneasy silence.  “The folks in these islands know me, all right!” he asserted, and again was dumb.