other man ever got up earlier than Hank, you
can gamble on it. Now Hank gets busy gettin' square and he's somehow
got her insured for more'n she'll bring in the open market in many a
day. Hank figures this deal either of two ways; either I run her nose
into the San Diego slip again with a fat fee for him; or else it's Davy
Jones for the _New Moon_ and Hank quits with the insurance money."

"Know what barratry is, don't you?" demanded Kendric.

"Sure I know; if I didn't Hank would have told me." Barlow sipped his
champagne pleasantly. "But we'll bring her home, never you fret,
Headlong. And we'll pay the fee and live like lords on top of it.
Hank ain't frettin'. I spun him the yarn, seein' I had to, and he'd of
come along himself if he hadn't been sick. Which would have meant a
three way split and I'm just as glad he didn't."

Kendric went out on deck and leaned against the wind and watched the
water slip away as the schooner rose and settled and fought ahead.
Then he strolled to the stern and took a turn at the wheel, joying in
the grip of it after a long separation from the old life which it
brought surging back into his memory. And while he reaccustomed
himself to the work Nigger Ben stood by, watching him jealously and at
first with obvious suspicion.

Nigger Ben, as Kendric had intimated, was a man to be proud of on a
cruise like this one. If not seven feet tall, at least he had passed
the half-way mark between that and six, a hulking, full-blooded African
with monster shoulders and half-naked chest and a skull showing under
his close-cropped kinks like a gorilla's. He was an anomaly, all
taken: he had a voice as high and sweet-toned as a woman singer's; he
had an air of extreme brutality and with the animals on board, a ship
cat and a canary belonging to Philippine Charlie he was all gentleness;
he had by all odds the largest, flattest feet that Kendric had ever
seen attached to a man and yet on them he moved quickly and lightly and
not without grace; he held the _New Moon_ in a sort of ghostly fear,
his eyes all whites when he vowed she was "ha'nted," and yet he loved
her with all of the heart in his big black body.

"Sho', she's ha'nted!" he proclaimed vigorously after a while during
which he had come to have confidence in the new steersman's knowledge
and had been intrigued into conversation. "Don't I know? Black folks
knows sooner'n white folks about ha'nts, Cap'n. Ain't I heered all the
happ