. . "Ship-owning it with the best.
A lottery ticket you want. Ha! ha! I will give you lottery tickets, my
boy. Let the old ship sink and the old chum starve--that's right. He
don't go wrong--Massy don't. Not he. He's a genius--that man is. That's
the way to win your money. Ship and chum must go."

"The silly fool has taken it to heart," muttered Massy to himself. And,
listening with a softened expression of face for any slight sign of
returning drowsiness, he was discouraged profoundly by a burst of
laughter full of joyful irony.

"Would like to see her at the bottom of the sea! Oh, you clever, clever
devil! Wish her sunk, eh? I should think you would, my boy; the damned
old thing and all your troubles with her. Rake in the insurance money
--turn your back on your old chum--all's well--gentleman again."

A grim stillness had come over Massy's face. Only his big black eyes
rolled uneasily. The raving fool. And yet it was all true. Yes. Lottery
tickets, too. All true. What? Beginning again? He wished he
wouldn't. . . .

But it was even so. The imaginative drunkard on the other side of the
bulkhead shook off the deathlike stillness that after his last words had
fallen on the dark ship moored to a silent shore.

"Don't you dare to say anything against George Massy, Esquire. When he's
tired of waiting he will do away with her. Look out! Down she goes--chum
and all. He'll know how to . . ."

The voice hesitated, weary, dreamy, lost, as if dying away in a vast
open space.

". . . Find a trick that will work. He's up to it--never fear . . ."

He must have been very drunk, for at last the heavy sleep gripped him
with the suddenness of a magic spell, and the last word lengthened
itself into an interminable, noisy, in-drawn snore. And then even the
snoring stopped, and all was still.

But it seemed as though Mr. Massy had suddenly come to doubt the
efficacy of sleep as against a man's troubles; or perhaps he had found
the relief he needed in the stillness of a calm contemplation that
may contain the vivid thoughts of wealth, of a stroke of luck, of long
idleness, and may bring before you the imagined form of every desire;
for, turning about and throwing his arms over the edge of his bunk, he
stood there with his feet on his favorite old coat, looking out through
the round port into the night over the river. Sometimes a breath of wind
would enter and touch his face, a cool breath charged with the damp,
fresh feel from a