I crumpled up the letter and rammed it into my pocket.  Ransome carried off two big doses to the men forward.  As to myself, I did not go on deck as yet.  I went instead to the door of Mr. Burns’ room, and gave him that news, too.

It was impossible to say the effect it had on him.  At first I thought that he was speechless.  His head lay sunk in the pillow.  He moved his lips enough, however, to assure me that he was getting much stronger; a statement shockingly untrue on the face of it.

That afternoon I took my watch as a matter of course.  A great over-heated stillness enveloped the ship and seemed to hold her motionless in a flaming ambience composed in two shades of blue.  Faint, hot puffs eddied nervelessly from her sails.  And yet she moved.  She must have.  For, as the sun was setting, we had drawn abreast of Cape Liant and dropped it behind us:  an ominous retreating shadow in the last gleams of twilight.

In the evening, under the crude glare of his lamp, Mr. Burns seemed to have come more to the surface of his bedding.  It was as if a depressing hand had been lifted off him.  He answered my few words by a comparatively long, connected speech.  He asserted himself strongly.  If he escaped being smothered by this stagnant heat, he said, he was confident that in a very few days he would be able to come up on deck and help me.

While he was speaking I trembled lest this effort of energy should leave him lifeless before my eyes.  But I cannot deny that there was something comforting in his willingness.  I made a suitable reply, but pointed out to him that the only thing that could really help us was wind—­a fair wind.

He rolled his head impatiently on the pillow.  And it was not comforting in the least to hear him begin to mutter crazily about the late captain, that old man buried in latitude 8 d 20’, right in our way—­ambushed at the entrance of the Gulf.

“Are you still thinking of your late captain, Mr. Burns?” I said.  “I imagine the dead feel no animosity against the living.  They care nothing for them.”

“You don’t know that one,” he breathed out feebly.

“No.  I didn’t know him, and he didn’t know me.  And so he can’t have any grievance against me, anyway.”

“Yes.  But there’s all the rest of us on board,” he insisted.

I felt the inexpugnable strength of common sense being insidiously menaced by this gruesome, by this insane, delusion.  And I said: 

“You mustn’t talk so much.  You will tire yourself.”

“And there is the ship herself,” he persisted in a whisper.

“Now, not a word more,” I said, stepping in and laying my hand on his cool forehead.  It proved to me that this atrocious absurdity was rooted in the man himself and not in the disease, which, apparently, had emptied him of every power, mental and physical, except that one fixed idea.

I avoided giving Mr. Burns any opening for conversation for the next few days.  I merely used to throw him a hasty, cheery word when passing his door.  I believe that if he had had the strength he would have called out after me more than once.  But he hadn’t the strength.  Ransome, however, observed to me one afternoon that the mate “seemed to be picking up wonderfully.”