Carter surveyed him with a candidly curious gaze.  “Well, Captain, Mrs. Travers did let on a bit to me about our chief-officer’s boat.  You’ve stopped it, haven’t you?  How she got to know God only knows.  She was sorry she spoke, too, but it wasn’t so much of news to me as she thought.  I can put two and two together, sometimes.  Those rockets, last night, eh?  I wished I had bitten my tongue out before I told you about our first gig.  But I was taken unawares.  Wasn’t I?  I put it to you:  wasn’t I?  And so I told her when she asked me what passed between you and me on board this brig, not twenty-four hours ago.  Things look different now, all of a sudden.  Enough to scare a woman, but she is the best man of them all on board.  The others are fairly off the chump because it’s a bit dark and something has happened they ain’t used to.  But she has something on her mind.  I can’t make her out!” He paused, wriggled his shoulders slightly—­“No more than I can make you out,” he added.

“That’s your trouble, is it?” said Lingard, slowly.

“Aye, Captain.  Is it all clear to you?  Stopping boats, kidnapping gentlemen.  That’s fun in a way, only—­I am a youngster to you—­but is it all clear to you?  Old Robinson wasn’t particular, you know, and he—­”

“Clearer than daylight,” cried Lingard, hotly.  “I can’t give up—­”

He checked himself.  Carter waited.  The flare bearers stood rigid, turning their faces away from the flame, and in the play of gleams at its foot the mast near by, like a lofty column, ascended in the great darkness.  A lot of ropes ran up slanting into a dark void and were lost to sight, but high aloft a brace block gleamed white, the end of a yard-arm could be seen suspended in the air and as if glowing with its own light.  The sky had clouded over the brig without a breath of wind.

“Give up,” repeated Carter with an uneasy shuffle of feet.

“Nobody,” finished Lingard.  “I can’t.  It’s as clear as daylight.  I can’t!  No!  Nothing!”

He stared straight out afar, and after looking at him Carter felt moved by a bit of youthful intuition to murmur, “That’s bad,” in a tone that almost in spite of himself hinted at the dawning of a befogged compassion.

He had a sense of confusion within him, the sense of mystery without.  He had never experienced anything like it all the time when serving with old Robinson in the Ly-e-moon.  And yet he had seen and taken part in some queer doings that were not clear to him at the time.  They were secret but they suggested something comprehensible.  This affair did not.  It had somehow a subtlety that affected him.  He was uneasy as if there had been a breath of magic on events and men giving to this complication of a yachting voyage a significance impossible to perceive, but felt in the words, in the gestures, in the events, which made them all strangely, obscurely startling.