Cord! Oh, McCord!"

The spark came swimming across the deck. "Hello! Hello there--ah--"
There was a note of querulous uneasiness there that somehow jarred with
my remembrance of this man.

"Ridgeway," I explained.

He echoed the name uncertainly, still with that suggestion of
peevishness, hanging over the rail and peering down at us. "Oh! By
gracious!" he exclaimed, abruptly. "I'm glad to see you, Ridgeway. I
had a boatman coming out before this, but I guess--well, I guess he'll
be along. By gracious! I'm glad--"

"I'll not keep you," I told the gnome, putting the money in his palm
and reaching for the rail. McCord lent me a hand on my wrist. Then
when I stood squarely on the deck beside him he appeared to forget my
presence, leaned forward heavily on the rail, and squinted after my
waning boatman.

"Ahoy--boat!" he called out, sharply, shielding his lips with his
hands. His violence seemed to bring him out of the blank, for he fell
immediately to puffing strongly at his cigar and explaining in rather
a shame-voiced way that he was beginning to think his own boatman had
"passed him up."

"Come in and have a nip," he urged with an abrupt heartiness, clapping
me on the shoulder.

"So you've--" I did not say what I had intended. I was thinking that
in the old days McCord had made rather a fetish of touching nothing
stronger than beer. Neither had he been of the shoulder-clapping sort.
"So you've got something aboard?" I shifted.

"Dead men's liquor," he chuckled. It gave me a queer feeling in the
pit of my stomach to hear him. I began to wish I had not come, but
there was nothing for it now but to follow him into the afterhouse.
The cabin itself might have been nine feet square, with three bunks
occupying the port side. To the right opened the master's stateroom,
and a door in the forward bulkhead led to the galley.

I took in these features at a casual glance. Then, hardly knowing why
I did it, I began to examine them with greater care.

"Have you a match?" I asked. My voice sounded very small, as though
something unheard of had happened to all the air.

"Smoke?" he asked. "I'll get you a cigar."

"No." I took the proffered match, scratched it on the side of the galley
door, and passed out. There seemed to be a thousand pans there, throwing
my match back at me from every wall of the box-like compartment. Even
McCord's eyes, in the doorway, were large and round and shining. He
probably thought me crazy. Per