se which Blake carried somewhere deep within his seemingly
tepid-willed carcass, like the calcinated pearl at the center of an
oyster.

"You 'd better turn out!" he called back as he stepped into the
engulfing gloom of the gangway.

Blake rolled out of his berth and dressed without haste or excitement.
Already, overhead, he could hear the continuous tramping of feet, with
now and then a quiet-noted order from Tankred himself. He could hear
other noises along the ship's side, as though a landing-ladder were
being bolted and lowered along the rusty plates.

When he went up on deck he found the boat in utter darkness. To that
slowly moving mass, for she was now drifting ahead under quarter-speed,
this obliteration of light imparted a sense of stealthiness. This note
of suspense, of watchfulness, of illicit adventure was reflected in the
very tones of the motley deckhands who brushed past him in the humid
velvety blackness.

As he stood at the rail, staring ahead through this blackness, Blake
could see a light here and there along the horizon. These lights
increased in number as the boat steamed slowly on. Then, far away in
the roadstead ahead of them, he made out an entire cluster of lights,
like those of a liner at anchor. Then he heard the tinkle of a bell
below deck, and he realized that the engines had stopped.

In the lull of the quieted ship's screw he could hear the wash of
distant surf, faint and phantasmal above the material little near-by
boat-noises. Then came a call, faint and muffled, like the complaining
note of a harbor gull. A moment later the slow creak of oars crept up
to Blake's straining ears. Then out of the heart of the darkness that
surrounded him, not fifty feet away, he saw emerge one faint point of
light, rising and falling with a rhythm as sleepy as the slow creak of
the oars. On each side of it other small lights sprang up. They were
close beside the ship, by this time, a flotilla of lights, and each
light, Blake finally saw, came from a lantern that stood deep in the
bottom of a boat, a lantern that had been covered with a square of
matting or sail-cloth, until some prearranged signal from the drifting
steamer elicited its answering flicker of light. Then they swarmed
about the oily water, shifting and swaying on their course like a
cluster of fireflies, alternately dark and luminous in the dip and rise
of the ground-swell. Within each small aura of radiance the watcher at
th