It was like fighting desperately toward destruction for the ship and the men.  This was evident without argument.  Mr. Burns, losing all restraint, put his face close to his captain’s and fairly yelled:  “You, sir, are going out of the world.  But I can’t wait till you are dead before I put the helm up.  You must do it yourself.  You must do it now!”

The man on the couch snarled in contempt.  “So I am going out of the world—­am I?”

“Yes, sir—­you haven’t many days left in it,” said Mr. Burns calming down.  “One can see it by your face.”

“My face, eh? . . .  Well, put up the helm and be damned to you.”

Burns flew on deck, got the ship before the wind, then came down again composed, but resolute.

“I’ve shaped a course for Pulo Condor, sir,” he said.  “When we make it, if you are still with us, you’ll tell me into what port you wish me to take the ship and I’ll do it.”

The old man gave him a look of savage spite, and said those atrocious words in deadly, slow tones.

“If I had my wish, neither the ship nor any of you would ever reach a port.  And I hope you won’t.”

Mr. Burns was profoundly shocked.  I believe he was positively frightened at the time.  It seems, however, that he managed to produce such an effective laugh that it was the old man’s turn to be frightened.  He shrank within himself and turned his back on him.

“And his head was not gone then,” Mr. Burns assured me excitedly.  “He meant every word of it.”

“Such was practically the late captain’s last speech.  No connected sentence passed his lips afterward.  That night he used the last of his strength to throw his fiddle over the side.  No one had actually seen him in the act, but after his death Mr. Burns couldn’t find the thing anywhere.  The empty case was very much in evidence, but the fiddle was clearly not in the ship.  And where else could it have gone to but overboard?”

“Threw his violin overboard!” I exclaimed.

“He did,” cried Mr. Burns excitedly.  “And it’s my belief he would have tried to take the ship down with him if it had been in human power.  He never meant her to see home again.  He wouldn’t write to his owners, he never wrote to his old wife, either—­he wasn’t going to.  He had made up his mind to cut adrift from everything.  That’s what it was.  He didn’t care for business, or freights, or for making a passage—­or anything.  He meant to have gone wandering about the world till he lost her with all hands.”

Mr. Burns looked like a man who had escaped great danger.  For a little he would have exclaimed:  “If it hadn’t been for me!” And the transparent innocence of his indignant eyes was underlined quaintly by the arrogant pair of moustaches which he proceeded to twist, and as if extend, horizontally.

I might have smiled if I had not been busy with my own sensations, which were not those of Mr. Burns.  I was already the man in command.  My sensations could not be like those of any other man on board.  In that community I stood, like a king in his country, in a class all by myself.  I mean an hereditary king, not a mere elected head of a state.  I was brought there to rule by an agency as remote from the people and as inscrutable almost to them as the Grace of God.