“We have never had so much wind as this since we left the roads.”

“There’s some heart in it, too,” he growled judiciously.  It was a remark of a perfectly sane seaman.  But he added immediately:  “It was about time I should come on deck.  I’ve been nursing my strength for this—­just for this.  Do you see it, sir?”

I said I did, and proceeded to hint that it would be advisable for him to go below now and take a rest.

His answer was an indignant “Go below!  Not if I know it, sir.”

Very cheerful!  He was a horrible nuisance.  And all at once he started to argue.  I could feel his crazy excitement in the dark.

“You don’t know how to go about it, sir.  How could you?  All this whispering and tiptoeing is no good.  You can’t hope to slink past a cunning, wide-awake, evil brute like he was.  You never heard him talk.  Enough to make your hair stand on end.  No!  No!  He wasn’t mad.  He was no more mad than I am.  He was just downright wicked.  Wicked so as to frighten most people.  I will tell you what he was.  He was nothing less than a thief and a murderer at heart.  And do you think he’s any different now because he’s dead?  Not he!  His carcass lies a hundred fathom under, but he’s just the same . . . in latitude 8 d 20’ north.”

He snorted defiantly.  I noted with weary resignation that the breeze had got lighter while he raved.  He was at it again.

“I ought to have thrown the beggar out of the ship over the rail like a dog.  It was only on account of the men. . . .  Fancy having to read the Burial Service over a brute like that! . . .  ‘Our departed brother’ . . .  I could have laughed.  That was what he couldn’t bear.  I suppose I am the only man that ever stood up to laugh at him.  When he got sick it used to scare that . . . brother. . . .  Brother. . . .  Departed. . . .  Sooner call a shark brother.”

The breeze had let go so suddenly that the way of the ship brought the wet sails heavily against the mast.  The spell of deadly stillness had caught us up again.  There seemed to be no escape.

“Hallo!” exclaimed Mr. Burns in a startled voice.  “Calm again!”

I addressed him as though he had been sane.

“This is the sort of thing we’ve been having for seventeen days, Mr. Burns,” I said with intense bitterness.  “A puff, then a calm, and in a moment, you’ll see, she’ll be swinging on her heel with her head away from her course to the devil somewhere.”

He caught at the word.  “The old dodging Devil,” he screamed piercingly and burst into such a loud laugh as I had never heard before.  It was a provoking, mocking peal, with a hair-raising, screeching over-note of defiance.  I stepped back, utterly confounded.

Instantly there was a stir on the quarter-deck; murmurs of dismay.  A distressed voice cried out in the dark below us:  “Who’s that gone crazy, now?”

Perhaps they thought it was their captain?  Rush is not the word that could be applied to the utmost speed the poor fellows were up to; but in an amazing short time every man in the ship able to walk upright had found his way on to that poop.