him backward over the table and against its edge with a violence that
brought a yell of pain and made Bradish limp and passive. Mayo held him
there.

"My grudge, eh? My grudge!" the victor panted. "Because you wouldn't
tell me how the sneaks ruined me? No! The girl isn't here now. I'll tell
you! It's because you stole her self-respect and her good name, and it
makes you too dirty a dog to be her husband!"

He picked up Bradish and threw him on the floor. When he turned he saw
the girl's white, agonized, frightened face at the crack of the saloon
door.

"Captain Downs!" she shrieked, "that negro is killing him. He's killing
Ralph!"

The victor turned his back on her and lurched around the table on his
way out. He stroked blood from his face with his palm, and was glad that
she had not recognized him; and yet, her failure to do so, even though
he was such a pitiable figure of the man she had known, was one more
slash of the whip of anguish across his raw soul. For a moment they had
stood there, face to face, and only blank unrecognition greeted him; it
made this horrible contretemps seem all the more unreal.

Mayo did not pause to listen to the ravings of Captain Downs, who
came thrusting past her. Dizzy, bleeding, half blind, he rushed up the
forward companionway and went into the black night on deck.

The mate was bawling for all hands to shorten sail, and Mayo took his
place with the toilers, who were manning sheets and downhauls.

XXIII ~ THE MONSTER THAT SLIPPED ITS LEASH

And there Captain Kirby proved a coward at last,
And he played at bo-peep behind the mainmast,
And there they did stand, boys, and shiver and shake,
For fear that that terror their lives it would take.
--Admiral Benbow.

Rain came with the wind, and the weather settled into a sullen, driving,
summer easterly.

Late summer regularly furnishes one of those storms to the Atlantic
coast, a recrudescence of the wintry gales, a trial run of the elements,
a sort of inter-equinoctial testing out so that Eurus may be sure that
his bellows is in working condition.

Such a storm rarely gives warning ahead that it is to be severe. It
seems to be a meteorological prank in order to catch mariners napping.

At midnight the _Alden_ was plunging into creaming seas, her five masts
thrummed by the blast. With five thousand tons of coal weighting her,
she wallowed like a water-soaked log.

Mayo,