“It’s the queerest old go,” muttered Carter, looking down on to the floor.  “You are a strange man.  I suppose I must believe what you say—­unless you and that fat mate of yours are a couple of escaped lunatics that got hold of a brig by some means.  Why, that chap up there wanted to pick a quarrel with me for coming aboard, and now you threaten to shoot me rather than let me go.  Not that I care much about that; for some time or other you would get hanged for it; and you don’t look like a man that will end that way.  If what you say is only half true, I ought to get back to the yacht as quick as ever I can.  It strikes me that your coming to them will be only a small mercy, anyhow—­and I may be of some use—­But this is the queerest. . . .  May I go in my boat?”

“As you like,” said Lingard.  “There’s a rain squall coming.”

“I am in charge and will get wet along of my chaps.  Give us a good long line, Captain.”

“It’s done already,” said Lingard.  “You seem a sensible sailorman and can see that it would be useless to try and give me the slip.”

“For a man so ready to shoot, you seem very trustful,” drawled Carter.  “If I cut adrift in a squall, I stand a pretty fair chance not to see you again.”

“You just try,” said Lingard, drily.  “I have eyes in this brig, young man, that will see your boat when you couldn’t see the ship.  You are of the kind I like, but if you monkey with me I will find you—­and when I find you I will run you down as surely as I stand here.”

Carter slapped his thigh and his eyes twinkled.

“By the Lord Harry!” he cried.  “If it wasn’t for the men with me, I would try for sport.  You are so cocksure about the lot you can do, Captain.  You would aggravate a saint into open mutiny.”

His easy good humour had returned; but after a short burst of laughter, he became serious.

“Never fear,” he said, “I won’t slip away.  If there is to be any throat-cutting—­as you seem to hint—­mine will be there, too, I promise you, and. . . .”

He stretched his arms out, glanced at them, shook them a little.

“And this pair of arms to take care of it,” he added, in his old, careless drawl.

But the master of the brig sitting with both his elbows on the table, his face in his hands, had fallen unexpectedly into a meditation so concentrated and so profound that he seemed neither to hear, see, nor breathe.  The sight of that man’s complete absorption in thought was to Carter almost more surprising than any other occurrence of that night.  Had his strange host vanished suddenly from before his eyes, it could not have made him feel more uncomfortably alone in that cabin where the pertinacious clock kept ticking off the useless minutes of the calm before it would, with the same steady beat, begin to measure the aimless disturbance of the storm.

III