I shouted to them:  “It’s the mate.  Lay hold of him a couple of you. . . .”

I expected this performance to end in a ghastly sort of fight.  But Mr. Burns cut his derisive screeching dead short and turned upon them fiercely, yelling: 

“Aha!  Dog-gone ye!  You’ve found your tongues—­have ye?  I thought you were dumb.  Well, then—­laugh!  Laugh—­I tell you.  Now then—­all together.  One, two, three—­laugh!”

A moment of silence ensued, of silence so profound that you could have heard a pin drop on the deck.  Then Ransome’s unperturbed voice uttered pleasantly the words: 

“I think he has fainted, sir—­” The little motionless knot of men stirred, with low murmurs of relief.  “I’ve got him under the arms.  Get hold of his legs, some one.”

Yes.  It was a relief.  He was silenced for a time—­for a time.  I could not have stood another peal of that insane screeching.  I was sure of it; and just then Gambril, the austere Gambril, treated us to another vocal performance.  He began to sing out for relief.  His voice wailed pitifully in the darkness:  “Come aft somebody!  I can’t stand this.  Here she’ll be off again directly and I can’t. . . .”

I dashed aft myself meeting on my way a hard gust of wind whose approach Gambril’s ear had detected from afar and which filled the sails on the main in a series of muffled reports mingled with the low plaint of the spars.  I was just in time to seize the wheel while Frenchy who had followed me caught up the collapsing Gambril.  He hauled him out of the way, admonished him to lie still where he was, and then stepped up to relieve me, asking calmly: 

“How am I to steer her, sir?”

“Dead before it for the present.  I’ll get you a light in a moment.”

But going forward I met Ransome bringing up the spare binnacle lamp.  That man noticed everything, attended to everything, shed comfort around him as he moved.  As he passed me he remarked in a soothing tone that the stars were coming out.  They were.  The breeze was sweeping clear the sooty sky, breaking through the indolent silence of the sea.

The barrier of awful stillness which had encompassed us for so many days as though we had been accursed, was broken.  I felt that.  I let myself fall on to the skylight seat.  A faint white ridge of foam, thin, very thin, broke alongside.  The first for ages—­for ages.  I could have cheered, if it hadn’t been for the sense of guilt which clung to all my thoughts secretly.  Ransome stood before me.

“What about the mate,” I asked anxiously.  “Still unconscious?”

“Well, sir—­it’s funny,” Ransome was evidently puzzled.  “He hasn’t spoken a word, and his eyes are shut.  But it looks to me more like sound sleep than anything else.”

I accepted this view as the least troublesome of any, or at any rate, least disturbing.  Dead faint or deep slumber, Mr. Burns had to be left to himself for the present.  Ransome remarked suddenly: