mind," I suggested, "I
think we'd better be going ashore. I've got to get to my office rather
early in the morning. What do you say?"

He said nothing for the moment, but his finger had dropped. He leaned
back and stared straight into the core of the light above, his eyes
squinting.

"He would have been from the south of China, probably." He seemed to be
talking to himself. "There's a considerable sprinkling of the belief
down there, I've heard. It's an uncanny business--this transmigration of
souls--"

Personally, I had had enough of it. McCord's fingers came groping across
the table for the bottle. I picked it up hastily and let it go through
the open companionway, where it died with a faint gurgle, out somewhere
on the river.

"Now," I said to him, shaking the vagrant wrist, "either you come ashore
with me or you go in there and get under the blankets. You're drunk,
McCord--_drunk_. Do you hear me?"

"Ridgeway," he pronounced, bringing his eyes down to me and speaking
very slowly. "You're a fool, if you can't see better than that. I'm not
drunk. I'm sick. I haven't slept for three nights--and now I can't. And
you say--you--" He went to pieces very suddenly, jumped up, pounded the
legs of his chair on the decking, and shouted at me: "And you say that,
you--you landlubber, you office coddler! You're so comfortably sure that
everything in the world is cut and dried. Come back to the water again
and learn how to wonder--and stop talking like a damn fool. Do you know
where--Is there anything in your municipal budget to tell me where
Bjoernsen went? Listen!" He sat down, waving me to do the same, and went
on with a sort of desperate repression.

"It happened on the first night after we took this hellion. I'd stood
the wheel most of the afternoon--off and on, that is, because she sails
herself uncommonly well. Just put her on a reach, you know, and she
carries it off pretty well--"

"I know," I nodded.

"Well, we mugged up about seven o'clock. There was a good deal of canned
stuff in the galley, and Bjoernsen wasn't a bad hand with a kettle--a
thoroughgoing Square-head he was--tall and lean and yellow-haired, with
little fat, round cheeks and a white moustache. Not a bad chap at all.
He took the wheel to stand till midnight, and I turned in, but I didn't
drop off for quite a spell. I could hear his boots wandering around over
my head, padding off forward, coming back again. I heard him whistling
now and then--an