r stepfather of
how you have behaved. I'll have no such rioting as this aboard my
ship."

Barnaby True looked around him, but the young lady was gone. Nor, in
the blindness of his frenzy, had he seen when she had gone nor whither
she went. As for Sir John Malyoe, he stood in the light of a lantern,
his face gone as white as ashes, and I do believe if a look could
kill, the dreadful malevolent stare he fixed upon Barnaby True would
have slain him where he stood.

After Captain Manly had so shaken some wits into poor Barnaby he,
unhappy wretch, went to his cabin, as he was bidden to do, and there,
shutting the door upon himself, and flinging himself down, all dressed
as he was, upon his berth, yielded himself over to the profoundest
passion of humiliation and despair.

There he lay for I know not how long, staring into the darkness,
until by and by, in spite of his suffering and his despair, he dozed
off into a loose sleep, that was more like waking than sleep, being
possessed continually by the most vivid and distasteful dreams, from
which he would awaken only to doze off and to dream again.

It was from the midst of one of these extravagant dreams that he was
suddenly aroused by the noise of a pistol shot, and then the noise of
another and another, and then a great bump and a grinding jar, and
then the sound of many footsteps running across the deck and down into
the great cabin. Then came a tremendous uproar of voices in the great
cabin, the struggling as of men's bodies being tossed about, striking
violently against the partitions and bulkheads. At the same instant
arose a screaming of women's voices, and one voice, and that Sir John
Malyoe's, crying out as in the greatest extremity: "You villains! You
damned villains!" and with the sudden detonation of a pistol fired
into the close space of the great cabin.

Barnaby was out in the middle of his cabin in a moment, and taking
only time enough to snatch down one of the pistols that hung at the
head of his berth, flung out into the great cabin, to find it as black
as night, the lantern slung there having been either blown out or
dashed out into darkness. The prodigiously dark space was full of
uproar, the hubbub and confusion pierced through and through by that
keen sound of women's voices screaming, one in the cabin and the other
in the stateroom beyond. Almost immediately Barnaby pitched headlong
over two or three struggling men scuffling together upon the deck,