Martin knew. Even now, he could hear the uneasy, labored breathing of
the man in the bunk above.

It was a strange, changeable, eager face, Little Billy had. It seemed
to vary in age according to the hunchback's mood; these days he looked
forty, but Martin had seen him appear a youthful twenty during an
exceptionally happy moment. Actually, Martin learned during the
passage, Little Billy Corcoran's age was thirty-one.

He learned, moreover, that Little Billy was the son, and sole surviving
relative, of Judge Corcoran, a famous California politician in his day.
Judge Corcoran had been a noted "good fellow" and a famous man with the
bottle. And his son was a hunchback and a dipsomaniac. Little Billy
was blessed with a fine mind, and he had taken his degree at Yale, but
throughout his hectic life the thirst he was born with proved his
undoing.

"I am an oddity among a nation of self-made men," Little Billy once
told Martin. "They all commenced at the bottom and ascended fortune's
ladder, whereas I started at the top and descended. And what a
descent! I hit every rung of that ladder with a heavy bump, and jarred
Old Lady Grundy every time. I was the crying scandal, the horrible
example, of my native heath. That old rogue, my father, used to boast
that he never got drunk--I used to boast that I never got sober.
Finally, I bumped my last bump and found myself at the bottom. And
there I stayed, until Captain Dabney, and the dear girl, pulled me out
of the mire."

Almost literally true, this last, for Martin learned that five years
before, Captain Dabney had salvaged Little Billy off the beach at Suva,
a dreadful scarecrow of a man, and Ruth's nursing, and the clean sea
life, had built a new William Corcoran. But the appetite for the drink
was uneradicable, and the genial hunchback's life was a series of
losing battles with his hereditary curse.

But the boatswain was proved a poor prophet. Not that week, nor the
next, did they reach Fire Mountain. The _Cohasset_ crossed the path of
the Orient mail-packets, the great circle sailers, and they entered
their last stretch of Pacific sailing, above the forty-eighth parallel.

Captain Dabney's objective was the little-used gateway to the Bering
that lies between Copper Island and the outlying Aleuts. They sailed
upon a wild and desolate waste of leaden sea; a sea shrouded frequently
with fog, and plentifully populated with those shipmen's horrors,
foot-loose