So I stood there, half wishful, half afraid, deaf to all save my own swirling thoughts.  And there happened that which gave me my decision.

It was the man with the scar.  He had been lounging against the bar, an uninterested spectator of the bestowing of the runnership.  Now, my eyes fell upon him, and I saw to my surprise that he was shaken out of his careless humor.  He was standing tensely on the balls of his feet, and his hands were gripping the bar rail so fiercely his fingers seemed white and bloodless.  It was apparent some stern emotion wrestled him; the profile I saw was set like chiseled marble.  There was something indescribably menacing in his poise.  The sight of him jolted my ears open to the noises of the room.

The crowd was still talking about the Golden Bough.  And the talk had progressed, as talk of the Golden Bough always progressed, from skipper and mates, to the lady.  They spoke of the ship’s mystery, of the Captain’s lady.  She was a character to pique a sailorman’s interest, the Lady of the Golden Bough.  Her fame was as wide, and much sweeter, than the vessel’s.  With all their toughs’ frankness, the crowd were discussing the lady’s puzzling relations with Swope.

“Uncommon queer, I calls it,” said one chap, who had sailed in the ship.  “They call ’em man an’ wife, but she lives to port, an’ he to starboard.  Separate cabins, dash me!  I had it from the cabin boy.  They even eats separate. . . .  He’s nasty to her—­I’ve heard the devil snarl at her more than once, when I’ve had a wheel. . . .  Blank me, she’s a blessed angel.  There was I with a sprained wrist big as my blanked head, an’ Lynch a-hazin’ me to work—­and every morning she trips into the foc’sle with her bright cheer an’ her linaments.  A blanked, blessed angel, she is!”

“He beats her,” supplemented another man.  “I got it from a mate what chummed with the bloke as was a Sails on her one voyage.  He said, that sailmaker did, as how Swope got drunk, and beat her.”

The big Cockney, who had been visibly possessed by a pompous self-importance since his elevation to the dignity of runner, saw fit to interpose his contrary opinion of the Lady of the Golden Bough.  Because the man was vile, his words were vile.

“Blimme, yer needn’t worrit abaht Yankee Swope’s lydy, as yer call ’er.  She arn’t nah bleedin’ lydy—­she’s just a blarsted Judy.  Yer got to knock a Judy abaht, arn’t yer?  Hi ’arve hit straight—­’e picked ’er hoff the streets——­”

The man with the scar wheeled on his heel, reached out, and grasped the Cockney by his two wrists.  I exclaimed aloud when I saw the man’s full face.  There was death in it.  He spoke to Cockney in a voice of cold fury.  “You lie!” he cried.  “Say you lie!”

Cockney was a big man, and husky.  He cursed, and struggled.  But he was a child in the grasp of that white-faced giant towering over him.  The hands I had seen gripping the rail a moment before, now gripped Cockney’s wrists in the same terrible clutch.  They squeezed, as though to crush the very bones.  Cockney squirmed, and whimpered, then he broke down, and screamed in agony.