Next day he upset me thoroughly by renewing his entreaties.  I returned an evasive answer, and left him the picture of ghastly despair.  The day after I went in with reluctance, and he attacked me at once in a much stronger voice and with an abundance of argument which was quite startling.  He presented his case with a sort of crazy vigour, and asked me finally how would I like to have a man’s death on my conscience?  He wanted me to promise that I would not sail without him.

I said that I really must consult the doctor first.  He cried out at that.  The doctor!  Never!  That would be a death sentence.

The effort had exhausted him.  He closed his eyes, but went on rambling in a low voice.  I had hated him from the start.  The late captain had hated him, too.  Had wished him dead.  Had wished all hands dead. . . .

“What do you want to stand in with that wicked corpse for, sir?  He’ll have you, too,” he ended, blinking his glazed eyes vacantly.

“Mr. Burns,” I cried, very much discomposed, “what on earth are you talking about?”

He seemed to come to himself, though he was too weak to start.

“I don’t know,” he said languidly.  “But don’t ask that doctor, sir.  You are I are sailors.  Don’t ask him, sir.  Some day perhaps you will have a wife and child yourself.”

And again he pleaded for the promise that I would not leave him behind.  I had the firmness of mind not to give it to him.  Afterward this sternness seemed criminal; for my mind was made up.  That prostrated man, with hardly strength enough to breathe and ravaged by a passion of fear, was irresistible.  And, besides, he had happened to hit on the right words.  He and I were sailors.  That was a claim, for I had no other family.  As to the wife and child (some day) argument, it had no force.  It sounded merely bizarre.

I could imagine no claim that would be stronger and more absorbing than the claim of that ship, of these men snared in the river by silly commercial complications, as if in some poisonous trap.

However, I had nearly fought my way out.  Out to sea.  The sea—­which was pure, safe, and friendly.  Three days more.

That thought sustained and carried me on my way back to the ship.  In the saloon the doctor’s voice greeted me, and his large form followed his voice, issuing out of the starboard spare cabin where the ship’s medicine chest was kept securely lashed in the bed-place.

Finding that I was not on board he had gone in there, he said, to inspect the supply of drugs, bandages, and so on.  Everything was completed and in order.

I thanked him; I had just been thinking of asking him to do that very thing, as in a couple of days, as he knew, we were going to sea, where all our troubles of every sort would be over at last.

He listened gravely and made no answer.  But when I opened to him my mind as to Mr. Burns he sat down by my side, and, laying his hand on my knee amicably, begged me to think what it was I was exposing myself to.