he must have
dozed, he told Archy solemnly. For the next thing he remembered with any
approach to coherence was a figure with its back to him, standing by the
toilet shelf, holding up an empty glass and smelling it.... A figure he
knew. Yes, he nodded to Archy, who clicked his teeth and threw up his
head, it was the Old Man. And as swiftly as it had come, it was gone.
Mr. Spokesly found himself up on one elbow, pressing thumb and
forefinger into his eyes, and then peering from the brightness of the
light above his head into the rose-shaded twilight of the cabin. There
was no one there. Everything was just the same. The glass was still
there on the mahogany shelf, exactly as he had left it after taking a
tot of whiskey before lying down. Now wasn't that a curious experience,
he demanded?

But Archy was no votary of psychic phenomena. He waved everything of
that sort clean out of existence. What time was it? Quarter-past eight?
Why, he saw the Old Man himself sneaking up the saloon stairs to the
chart-room about that time. Of course it was the Old Man. Just the sort
of game he would be up to. It was revolting. Only the other day he had
given orders for his own supply of spirits to be put in his bedroom
instead of leaving it in Archy's charge. Never said a word to _him_,
mind you! Told the second steward to tell the chief steward. See the
game? Couldn't speak out like a man and say he'd missed a bottle or so.
Justice? There is no such thing as justice when you work for an
underhand, sneaking, spying....

Archy Bates had stopped short in his catalogue of the captain's
deformities as though he had been suddenly throttled. A bell was buzzing
in the pantry. They looked at each other. Archy put down his glass,
listened for a moment, hissed venomously, "That's him!" and slipped out.
Mr. Spokesly sat still while his friend was away answering the summons,
and nursed the rage in his heart to a dull glow. At times it died out
and he shivered as before a blackened fire, the dead ashes of a moody
disgust of life. One of the tragedies of mediocrity is the confused
nature of our emotions. We are like cracked bells, goodly enough in
outward form and fashion, but we don't ring true. Our intelligence shows
us many things about ourselves but fails to evoke a master passion. In
Mr. Spokesly's case, his great desire to have riches did not obscure
from his gaze the austere beauties of rectitude and the slow climb to an
honourable command. Ne