It did not enter my head to question his judgment. What he said had to
be. Was he not the Samurai?

And yet, a few minutes later, when he had gone below, I noticed Mr. Pike
enter the chart-house. After several paces up and down, and a brief
pause to watch Nancy and several men shift the weather cloth from lee to
weather, I strolled aft to the chart-house. Prompted by I know not what,
I peeped through one of the glass ports.

There stood Mr. Pike, his sou'wester doffed, his oilskins streaming
rivulets to the floor, while he, dividers and parallel rulers in hand,
bent over the chart. It was the expression of his face that startled me.
The habitual sourness had vanished. All that I could see was anxiety and
apprehension . . . yes, and age. I had never seen him look so old; for
there, at that moment, I beheld the wastage and weariness of all his
sixty-nine years of sea-battling and sea-staring.

I slipped away from the port and went along the deck to the break of the
poop, where I held on and stood staring through the gray and spray in the
conjectural direction of our drift. Somewhere, there, in the north-east
and north, I knew was a broken, iron coast of rocks upon which the
graybeards thundered. And there, in the chart-room, a redoubtable
sailorman bent anxiously over a chart as he measured and calculated, and
measured and calculated again, our position and our drift.

And I knew it could not be. It was not the Samurai but the henchman who
was weak and wrong. Age was beginning to tell upon him at last, which
could not be otherwise than expected when one considered that no man in
ten thousand had weathered age so successfully as he.

I laughed at my moment's qualm of foolishness and went below, well
content to meet my loved one and to rest secure in her father's wisdom.
Of course he was right. He had proved himself right too often already on
the long voyage from Baltimore.

At dinner Mr. Pike was quite distrait. He took no part whatever in the
conversation, and seemed always to be listening to something from
without--to the vexing clang of taut ropes that came down the hollow
jiggermast, to the muffled roar of the gale in the rigging, to the smash
and crash of the seas along our decks and against our iron walls.

Again I found myself sharing his apprehension, although I was too
discreet to question him then, or afterwards alone, about his trouble. At
eight he went on deck again to take the watch till m