? Look there!" He pointed to the stark figure.

"I see what's come, sir," said Sutton, and though he was white under his
stains he never flinched. "And Wickwire, he saw what _would_ come. He
was trying to stop me the night I dropped him into the river--when we
quarreled. Because, d'y'see, from fooling with the works of life just to
learn how they're made I'd begun fooling with the works of hell. And he
had found me out."

"Ah," said Raff, with one of his rare flashes. "_That_ was how you knew
the road to Li Chwan's!"

"To Li Chwan's--and--other places. I've been hitting it pretty regular
for six months or so. The chief tried to save me, but I wouldn't
hearken, and there, as you say--there's the result. It's just as if he'd
done it all as a sacrifice, to show me. It's just as if--as if he'd paid
for mine with the price of his own immortal soul!"...

We stared at him, a tattered ruin but an upstanding youngster, and we
could sense no flaw in him now. He had come to grips with raw truth for
once without failing--not without a falter, you understand, for he had
to put aside a boy's pride and a last illusion in himself--but
clear-eyed, the straight way, as every man likes to think he might have
done in his own youth.

"Well," said Raff at last. "What's your notion?" Sutton drew a deep
breath.

"You know, sir, the chief never took any note of time. One day or
another--one month or another, it was all alike to him. Well, here it
is: Why can't we strike out these seven weeks and three days from his
memory--as if they never had been? We're fixed just as we were when we
lost him. He's in his own bed, the ship's in the same berth, just
coaled: same weather, same crew, same folk about him--same everything.
He wakes up--wouldn't he think the whole mess had been a dream?...
Wouldn't he? Couldn't we make him, just as they did with
the Johnny here?" He hammered the book for emphasis. "_'Would not the
beggar then forget himself?'_"

We winked as it burst upon us. Here was one beggar who had forgotten
himself, anyway: his vanity, his posing, his weakness, in the fervor of
a real idea.

"Perhaps there's something in make-believe after all--some merit.
Perhaps it's got some truth in it too. It mightn't work, but I feel it
must and will. I got the tip from the very book I gammoned him with,
from the very passage he must have marked himself at random--d'y'see?
And if he should come right--"

"Whist!" breathed the captain. "He's s