is way and that
for a moment, then it disappeared, and in its place there sprang out a
bag of yellow light, like a fire-balloon at anchor in the heavens. I
could see the shadows of his head and hands moving monstrously over the
inner surface of the sail, and muffled exclamations without meaning came
down to me. After a moment he drew out his head and called: "All
right--they're here. Heads! there below!"

I ducked at his warning, and something spanked on the planking a yard
from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked up
a slipper--a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled with
a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere abaft
the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began to stagger down the
shrouds. Under his left arm he hugged a curious assortment of litter, a
sheaf of papers, a brace of revolvers, a gray kimono, and a soiled
apron.

"Well," he said when he had come to deck, "I feel like a man who has
gone to hell and come back again. You know I'd come to the place where I
really believed that about the cat. When you think of it--By gracious!
we haven't come so far from the jungle, after all."

We went aft and below and sat down at the table as we had been. McCord
broke a prolonged silence.

"I'm sort of glad he got away--poor cuss! He's probably climbing up a
wharf this minute, shivering and scared to death. Over toward the
gas-tanks, by the way he was swimming. By gracious! now that the world's
turned over straight again, I feel I could sleep a solid week. Poor
cuss! can you imagine him, Ridgeway--"

"Yes," I broke in. "I think I can. He must have lost his nerve when he
made out your smoke and shinnied up there to stow away, taking the
ship's papers with him. He would have attached some profound importance
to them--remember, the 'barbarian,' eight thousand miles from home.
Probably couldn't read a word. I suppose the cat followed him--the
traditional source of food. He must have wanted water badly."

"I should say! He wouldn't have taken the chances he did."

"Well," I announced, "at any rate, I can say it now--there's another
'mystery of the sea' gone to pot."

McCord lifted his heavy lids.

"No," he mumbled. "The mystery is that a man who has been to sea all
his life could sail around for three days with a man bundled up in his
top and not know it. When I think of him peeking down at me--and playing
off that damn cat--probably without