“For her sake?” I echoed.  I was aghast.  Somehow, it had never occurred to me that the lady might be in any danger.  “You don’t mean that she would be harmed!” I exclaimed.

He nodded, and there crept into his eyes an expression grim and desperate.  “I have cursed myself for giving way to the storm of hate and passion that brought me on board this ship,” he said, moodily.  “And yet—­it could not have been otherwise.”

He observed my questioning face, and added, “Swope knows we have talked together, she and I. He knows he must extinguish us both if he would rebury for good and all the truth he thought was already buried.”

“His wife—­his own wife!” I exclaimed.

The words probed the quick.  For a minute Newman’s reserve was gone, and the tormented soul of the man was plainly visible.

“It is a lie, a legal lie!” he cried.

He calmed immediately.  His self-control took charge; it was as if his will, caught napping for an instant, awoke, and drew a curtain that shut out alien eyes.

I was dumb, ashamed and sorry to have unwittingly hurt my friend.  But now he was speaking again, in his accustomed sober, emotionless voice.

“Of course, I trust you absolutely, Jack.  I’d like to tell you the whole story.  But—­I am not free to talk——­”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I blurted.  “I know you are my man, and you know I am your man.”

“You are a friend!” he exclaimed.  “But I will not sail under false colors in your eyes, lad.  I am a jail-bird, an escaped felon.”

“Oh, I knew all about that long ago,” I said, carelessly.

He looked his surprise.

“I heard that bum’s story through the wall, that night in the Knitting Swede’s,” I explained.  “I didn’t try to listen, but I couldn’t help hearing him.  About the frame-up they worked on you—­Beulah Twigg, and Mary—­that’s the lady, isn’t it?—­and the one Beasley called ’he’—­I know ‘he’ is Yankee Swope.  Oh, it was a dirty trick they played on you, Newman.  I’m with you in anything you do to get even.”

He shook his head, smiling.  “What a young savage you are, Jack!” says he.  “An eye for an eye, eh?  But you guess wrongly, lad.  That treachery you heard Beasley explain was but the beginning.  I was sent to prison for a murder, the brutal and cowardly murder of a helpless old man.”

“I know it was a frame-up,” I cried.  “And, anyway, I don’t care.  I know you’re on the square, and that is all that matters with me.”

“If I were not, your faith would make me on the square,” he answered.  “But—­I was not guilty.  I came on board the Golden Bough intending to become a murderer—­but that madness is past.  Now I am anxious to prevent killing—­any killing.  Now I am determined to preserve peace in this ship.