may understand that after a goodish
while as a castaway I was tired beyond the point of answering more
questions than I should happen to be asked. . . . So I gave
Valparaiso a silent blessing, and came home by the first ship, to
consult you and Collingwood. What--let me repeat--have you done with
Collingwood?"

"Jimmy?" said I. "He's married, a year since, and is already the
father of a bouncing boy. I acted as his best man, by request.
He has a delightful and tiny wife who keeps him in order, which he
passes on to the County of Warwickshire as Justice of the Peace and
Coram. . . . But about the _Eurotas_?" I persisted. "I don't think
you quite realise. There were passengers on board: and for months--"

"Of course there were passengers," Foe agreed. "It won't help their
relatives (will it?) to know for certain what they pretty well know
already. As I hinted to Norgate in my last letter, there was a
labour crisis on when we sailed. Some aggrieved blackguard on the
dock, acting on his own or under command of his 'Union,' shovelled
half a dozen bombs in with the coal. Simple process. Between seven
hundred and a thousand miles out, this particular batch of coal was
reached and shovelled into the forward furnaces. I counted four
explosions. Two of them blew her bows to pieces, and she sank by the
head and was gone in twenty minutes.

"Must I tell it, when I am home and dying to ask questions?--Oh, very
well, then. . . . I shall be perfectly truthful so far as the history
goes; but I warn you that at a certain point you won't like it, and
you'll go on to like it less. You and I have been friends, Roddy,
and you naturally suppose that I've come straight to you, as my first
friend, to be welcomed and to ask for counsel. But you suppose
wrong. I am come asking neither for advice, nor for a sympathy--
which I know I shan't get."

"My dear Jack--" I began to protest.

"Oh, be quiet," said he, "and let _me_ do the talking! I've had no
one to talk to, these five months around the Horn, but a Norwegian
skipper, a first mate of the same country, a fellow-passenger shipped
off as a dipsomaniac for a cure (we lost him somewhere in the worst
of it--I've an idea he let himself be swept overboard), and a mixed
crew that I helped to cure of _beri-beri_ at St. Helena. So I want
to do the talking, with your leave.

"--And I want to say this first, foremost, once and for all. I am
come _simply to tell you_. I unders