ed there, challenging.

"I do," he announced. "The Chinaman put them over the side, as we have
said. And then, after that, he died--of wounds about the head."

"So?" I had still sarcasm.

"You will remember," he went on, "that the skipper did not happen to
mention a cat, a _yellow_ cat, in his confessions."

"McCord," I begged him, "please drop it. Why in thunder _should_ he
mention a cat?"

"True. Why _should_ he mention a cat? I think one of the reasons why
he should _not_ mention a cat is because there did not happen to be a
cat aboard at that time."

"Oh, all right!" I reached out and pulled the bottle to my side of the
table. Then I took out my watch. "If you don't mind," I suggested, "I
think we'd better be going ashore. I've got to get to my office rather
early in the morning. What do you say?"

He said nothing for the moment, but his finger had dropped. He leaned
back and stared straight into the core of the light above, his eyes
squinting.

"He would have been from the south of China, probably." He seemed to
be talking to himself. "There's a considerable sprinkling of the belief
down there, I've heard. It's an uncanny business--this transmigration
of souls--"

Personally, I had had enough of it. McCord's fingers came groping across
the table for the bottle. I picked it up hastily and let it go through
the open companionway, where it died with a faint gurgle, out somewhere
on the river.

"Now," I said to him, shaking the vagrant wrist, "either you come ashore
with me or you go in there and get under the blankets. You're drunk,
McCord--_drunk_. Do you hear me?"

"Ridgeway," he pronounced, bringing his eyes down to me and speaking
very slowly. "You're a fool, if you can't see better than that. I'm not
drunk. I'm sick. I haven't slept for three nights--and now I can't. And
you say--you--" He went to pieces very suddenly, jumped up, pounded the
legs of his chair on the decking, and shouted at me: "And you say that,
you--you landlubber, you office coddler! You're so comfortably sure
that everything in the world is cut and dried. Come back to the water
again and learn how to wonder--and stop talking like a damn fool. Do
you know where--. Is there anything in your municipal budget to tell
me where Bjoernsen went? Listen!" He sat down, waving me to do the same,
and went on with a sort of desperate repression.

"It happened on the first night after we took this hellion. I'd stood
the wheel most of the aft