The island fell away in the west. All day long, and for three days more, the ketch Diana held the northeast trade off her larboard bow, close-hauled. Ben supposed that presently Shawn would turn south and prepare for another chicken-thief raid somewhere in the Leeward Islands. On the fifth day he did shift course, but not much, the unchanging wind now on the larboard beam, the Diana's direction southeast.

A withdrawn, taciturn mood had come over Captain Shawn. The members of his ragamuffin crew, including Ben, felt it as schoolboys feel a teacher's cold in the head. For Ben there was the growing urgency of that secret whisper: Something I can do....

Ben was forced to admit that, whatever else might have happened to the year, he had learned a little seamanship. He had acquired sea-legs even before the capture of Artemis. He was never seasick—Shawn himself knew green moments from time to time. Ben had learned the ropes—no mystery after all but quite simple once you agreed to use your head and accept the buckle end of Marsh's belt as a parallel to the sarcasm of Gideon Hibbs. Marsh was acidly fair about that: as soon as Ben's hand had learned to jump for the right rope at the right instant, the belt was no longer used.

Shawn's instruction had followed a different idiom—articulate explanation, with continuing patience (not displayed toward anyone but Ben). Somehow the Irishman conveyed: Let's forget that we seem to be enemies; let's consider this logic of navigation, the sextant, the tiller, the handling of sail, powers of wind and current and the pattern of the clear stars; let's do this as though we were not afraid to turn our backs to each other, you with the knife I let you keep, and I with mine. Ben could respond to this; could not help responding.

The secret whisper continued in the dark.

Ben's body was learning too, his hands calloused and enlarged, his shoulders thickened. Already wiry and tough, he was aware of a burgeoning strength that never reached exhaustion even in the occasional days of bad weather when the mainsail could stiffen and fight back like a living beast. When Ben stripped for swimming, as he had done back there at the island to the amused horror of all aboard, he had noticed a whiplash hardness in leg and thigh, surely much greater than he had possessed a year ago. Ben had been startled to learn—last July, when the Diana put in for careening at another lonely island—that not one other man aboard could swim. So Ben, who had learned it fishlike in the waters of the Pocumtuck River with Reuben darting around him, a little demon of gold and ivory, frolicked alone in the surf and beyond it, amazed and delighted at the buoyancy of salt water and the untiring almightiness of the waves. Even to Shawn it was a mystery. Manuel giggled helplessly. Tom Ball appeared to regard it as a black art.

Once in November, during a lesson on the sextant, Shawn had happened to stretch and flex his shoulders, and Ben discovered that he was fully as tall as Captain Shawn. Another time, Ben spoke with careless sharpness to Joey Mills—the old man's garrulity could be a nuisance—and Joey had drawn back in manifest physical fright, astonishing to Ben until he understood: Well, I could break him in two, couldn't I?

Manuel? One fist, and Manuel would cringe and run.

Ledyard? Maybe, just maybe. That would be a near thing.

Ball? French Jack? Well, hardly. And still, either of them might think twice before starting anything unarmed, or alone.

Dummy? Never, if he got a grip.

Judah Marsh? Why, knives put aside, by God, I could flatten him like a bug, and wash my hands.

Shawn?...

The whisper continued in the dark.

Since leaving the island under the northeast trade, Captain Shawn had spent most of his time in the locked cabin, or on deck in a black and scowling silence. He ordered the log cast unreasonably often; it was plain the Diana was maintaining an even speed, better than nine knots. Ben was present whenever Shawn checked his bearings, and could make his own calculations. When his trick at the helm began at midnight on the seventh night out from the island, the Diana had crossed the 18th parallel and was surely far east of the Leewards, too far if Shawn intended any business with them, and was still running blandly southeast. Why?...

In these wartime years, with no pressure of maritime unemployment to drive hungry men into piracy, some furtive harbors throughout the Caribbean still nourished the old trade, and at some outwardly respectable ports a vessel of dubious virtue could still put in to dispose of this and that with few questions asked. So much had been common talk at Boston; Ben heard it again from the half-timid chatter of Joey Mills. Captain Shawn might have found men in those ports to make up his complement; he never went near one of them, all year long. Joey Mills dared to ask why, and shook his head and spat over the rail. "Tell you why," said Joey Mills, watching Ben with squirrely courage and making sure no one else could hear. "He'll get more men, he says, from the fine prize we a'n't seen yet—or if we seen it we been evermore tacking somewheres else, God almighty damn. But this here ketch, Ben Cory, let alone it seems she a'n't bound for nowhere, she a'n't got nothing. Salt cod, God almighty damn. Put in at one of them places, nothing to trade, he'd be laughed at. They'd give him salt cod, yah. I allow he can't bear no laughing at—now don't betray me, don't never let it out I said no such of a thing—you wouldn't, boy?" Before Ben could even promise, he chuckled in apology and fled, and avoided Ben for days....

Far away ahead this midnight, over the curve of the world, stood the shoulder of Africa. Somewhere in the south—Ben gazed off idly to his right in the murmurous dark—down there beyond the Line, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of the southern continent. Down there too—so far that one's thought hardly dared trouble with it—the wild cold legendary region of the Horn, Magellan's gateway, the path to the western sea.

Here in the undemanding night Ben found it possible to command the earth to be not vast but small. Merely to point with the right arm toward the Horn—did not that reduce the world to a modest map that might be held in fancy, handled, contemplated?—never mind the thousands of leagues of open sea where that right arm was no greater than one splash of foam. The paradox was familiar. Mr. Gideon Hibbs had touched on it at the borders of philosophy: how, if the container be greater than the thing contained, that organ in the skull must be somehow wider than a galaxy....

The shadow coming slowly aft might be Manuel, ready to relieve Ben at the tiller. No—too soon, and Manuel was aloft. Moonrise had begun some while ago at Ben's left shoulder, magnificent and calm. The shadow was not Manuel but Daniel Shawn, prowling the dark as he often did when, as Ben supposed, he could not sleep. Ben suppressed a word of greeting. His arm over the tiller held firm with elastic readiness for all of the Diana's whims, as Shawn himself had patiently taught him it must do. Captain Shawn stood a long time at the after rail gazing northwestward.

It could happen some night, Ben knew, out of a silence like this. The unknowable driven brain could abruptly decide that Ben Cory must no longer live. What is madness?... After the decision, execution—but not immediate, perhaps. It did not seem to be Shawn's way to kill with his own hand.

He was capable of it. Joey Mills had told Ben how, in the battle with the Schouven, Shawn had boarded the sloop with the rest, two pistols in his belt. Disdaining a cutlass after the pistols were empty, Shawn went in howling with his short knife, and that on a tall Dutchman with long arms—as if, Mills muttered, death was a nothing to Captain Shawn, or welcome. But Shawn wasn't for dying that day.

Quite gently Shawn asked; "All quiet, Ben?"

"Yea, quiet." Not "Yea, sir." Not "Yea, Captain." The self clinging to integrity will snatch at trivia. But for Ben there was a kind of upside-down shame in reflecting that anyone else aboard who omitted the formula of humility would very quickly be instructed with a rope's end. And so, Ben Cory thought, it seems Ben Cory doth care about the opinion of others, be they only the rats aboard a pirate ketch, the which would be dem'd good and comical—could I be telling it to Ru before the fire in Uncle John's library, and sweet Kate maybe bringing us a plate of——

"Ben, who's aloft?"

"Manuel."

"Have you chanced to look aft, the last half-hour, boy?"

"No. Watching the bow, so to keep the bearing you ordered."

"Then give me the helm, and take this glass"—Shawn's voice was rising curiously—"and look well abaft, and tell me what you see at all."

"Where away?"

"God damn it," said Shawn, still rather softly, "find it yourself!" He thrust the spyglass into Ben's hand and snatched the tiller, humming in his teeth and not pleasantly.

Ben searched the northwestern arc, and found nothing but empty sea. Something to throw him off his guard?—he lowered the glass quickly, but Shawn was not even watching him. Shawn was staring forward, head high, the moon's whiteness displaying his face, cold and suffering and proud.

"I don't find anything."

"Look again."

"I see the stars, a quiet sea, and not another thing."

"Judah!" Marsh hurried aft. "Take the glass, Mr. Marsh. See what you can find to the northwest."

Ben stood away from them. He saw Marsh stiffen with uneasiness or bewilderment; fidget, and mutter, and rub the glass with an end of his shirt. "Mr. Shawn, sir, my one glim a'n't too sharp."

Shawn immensely filled his lungs and slowly let the breath go. "You too maybe?... Well—it may be gone." It might be easier, Ben thought, to endure the ache of waiting if Shawn himself would look aft again, but he would not.

"Was it a sail, Captain?"

"It wasn't the Lamb of God walking upon the waters, Mr. Marsh. I am changing course two points. Sou'-sou'east, d'you hear? Call that fool Manuel from aloft, who wouldn't be seeing the entire Royal Navy and it half a mile to wind'ard. He and Dummy will make ready to haul me the tack—will you move, man?" Marsh vanished forward; Ben heard his thin snarl crying Manuel down from the masthead. "Well, Cory?—get to the mizzen, damn you!" Ready in his place—what else?—Ben presently heard Marsh's advisory shout. "Cory, Mother of God, can't you speak up like a seaman?"

"Ready!"

"Lee-oh!" The Diana answered calmly, undismayed. "Trim her!" Ben had already done so, handily. "Will you sheet her in, you bloody farmer? Oh, dear Mother of God, for men to sail with me!..." Undismayed, the Diana settled to her new course under the friendly wind. A small maneuver—a crew of boys could have done it in this soft landsman's weather. Ben knew that Shawn had no cause to rave at his part in it; knew also in a moment that the crying voice climbing from the region of the helm was no longer concerned with him. "Speak plainer! I cannot hear you.... Oh, but I will go alone if I must. Have I not alway gone alone? Have I not alway made mine own law—as I am directed, as I am directed—but thou knowest I am compassed about.... Plainer! Speak plain!—or send me a wind and not this damned crawling breeze! Am I to meet them in a bloody calm?... Then, most soberly and quietly: "Ben—aft with you!"

Ben returned aft, being on duty and having perhaps no choice. "Am I to take the helm again?"

"First look, only once more. Man dear, don't you see?—it could be I'm growing old and foolish, but—but for all you hate me, you can't call me fool, Beneen, you can't do that."

"I never have."

"Then look once more—the way I might've been deceived—the way the Devil's minions are in the thing tonight, now that's no lie. I waited too long, so I did. I cast about, while time wasted, praying for the easier course—a fleet—men enough—seeing I could not have the support of those who should have understood me. I prayed for the easier course, so I did, but I tell you now, Beneen, a man must never do that."

And Ben looked again, and found nothing. "It was a sail?"

"I thought so. I thought so, Ben."

"If you'll call Manuel aft, whose eyes are good as mine——"

"Manuel is it? Have I time for the witless, when—but I may have been deceived. Not there, you say, and I'm believing you. Nothing?"

"Nothing. Sometimes, Mr. Shawn, I've been fooled at night by a whale's spouting. The spray of him seems to hang in the air a while, and I suppose moonlight may lend it the look of a sail." Shawn laughed a little, his breathing slower. He seemed not annoyed that an untamed pup should be instructing him concerning sea-born illusions. "Well, do you take the helm again, and this'll be your bearing, steady as she goes."

"May I ask, Mr. Shawn, is this course for Martinique?"

"It seems to be gone and that's the truth, and yet I could have sworn—what? Martinique? Why, if my reckoning is right, her present course maintained will bear her a very far way to the east of Martinique."

"Nothing before us then but the South Atlantic."

"The Line, the South Atlantic, and the Horn. No more waiting. No more of this petty cruising about. No more—piracy. Do you hear me?"

"Less than a year ago I might have jumped at the sound of that."

"Not now?"

"You're not speaking to a boy now, Mr. Shawn."

"'Deed so, friend? When did that happen?"

"Who can ever say? It happened.... Mr. Shawn, I've asked you a dozen times, and have been refused, and now I say again: I wish to go in that cabin and speak with Captain Jenks."

"And I'll be telling you for maybe the hundredth time, Ben, he is not captain of this or any other vessel.... Ben, with all the charity I've seen in you, can you not hear a man acknowledge his error? I said, no more piracy. I have done wrong, almost betraying my purpose. I say now—and this is like something you once said to me yourself—henceforth I will not lift my hand against any man except to defend my life and my purpose. Jenks?—why, I think he can be released, and you too if it must be so. I shall be forced to put in at some Brazilian port for water and provisions, and there, I think—well, we shall see. Can I say more?"

"Yes, you could, Mr. Shawn, because I'm asking you again: Why do you hold him at all? Mills says you question him continually, and he answers nothing."

"That's true." Shawn gazed steadily northward, at the open sea. "Answers nothing, and will any man hold such a silence with nothing to hide?"

"Hide, Mr. Shawn? Captain Jenks, hide?"

"Must I say again, he is not captain now?... Ben, did you know I spent more than a year in that sorry city of Boston?"

"No, how should I?"

"Oh, you might've.... More than a year, seeking support for the greatest venture a man's spirit ever conceived. I was ignored, laughed at, brushed aside. I sought out the merchants, for behind all the pious canting they've become the rulers of your Boston and I suppose you know it. Sought 'em out one after another, and spilled my heart, the while they looked at my poor clothes and shuffled their feet and remembered important business. I sought audience with your Governor Dudley himself—Mother of God, would he even admit me to the bloody presence? Queen Anne's man, body and soul.... Somehow, Ben—and mark this, I pray you—at some time that miserable year, the story was passed about that I had been with John Quelch. And—why, damn their souls, so I was, for a while. I did ship with him, being penniless and starving, and escaped him as soon as I might. He was evil, Ben, a common pirate, it was right he should hang. I served him briefly, I did that, having no choice, and the rumor of it was made a cause why I should be persecuted, ignored, laughed at, brushed aside. Compassed about.... And still, didn't I ask far less than was asked by Cabot, Drake, Magellan? A trifle of support, mind you, a tiny fleet, a sound crew, a charter to explore—don't you see any man of them might have compounded his fortune a hundred times and written his name in history beside my own? But would they? You know the answer, and they shall know the whole of it too, in time.... And somehow, Ben—while I went from one to another wearing my heart out—somehow a few of them did finally understand a little of what I so recklessly told concerning this venture. Certain of them began to think: Why not the venture without the man? You see? Have you ever heard of such a thing as stealing a man's dreams?"

"What has this to do with Captain Jenks?"

"Surely it's plain? The man you childishly call Captain was one of those who began to ask themselves: What if this wild, shabby, tedious Irishman hath glimpsed something of value after all? What if there are new lands for the taking in the western sea, and why should this miserable noisy Sligo man, this old Shawn, why should he have any part of it?... Why, I couldn't believe this of Peter Jenks myself for a long time—never came to me that he was one of 'em, till he hired that man Hanson in the room of me—and that in despite of your great-uncle."

"But——"

"Whisht, Ben! You'll be telling me your great-uncle gave me no promise hard and fast, but I know men's hearts. But for Jenks, I'd've had my way, and glory in it for Mr. Kenny as well as me, don't you doubt it. It wasn't to be. When he took on that agent Hanson, sure my voice was plain enough, I could see how they'd been planning it all the while. You see now, don't you? Had I not taken Artemis from him, Jenks would have her now the other side of the Horn, and Boston would never see her again. But I, Ben—why, I shall give her back the name of Artemis, and I'll send her home, when she's taken us to the new country...." In the silence Ben caught the glint of something—merely the copper farthing; at length Shawn spoke again, quietly: "True, Ben—nothing before you now but the Line, and the South Atlantic, and the Horn. Nothing below you but the Atlantic. And once on a time wasn't I a boy of your age who believed that God was over me?" He was moving away. Ben thought he might be weeping, but his voice often sounded so when his eyes were dry. "And over you, over all that breathe. Oh, but in those days I was that young and foolish you wouldn't know the misguided thoughts that would seize hold of me and deceive, for the voices I heard then were not God's voice, they were far other. Maybe even now I'm not certain of anything, except that I cannot die until I've looked again on the color of the western sea." He returned swift and silent out of the shadow and stood close to the helm, eyes level with Ben's; no taller than Ben. Not even as tall, perhaps. "What now? Why did I say that, Ben? Why did I say, the color of the western sea?"

Ben supposed his right hand could flash away from the tiller to his belt, if it must. "How could I know why you say any of the things you do?"

"Ah? But you must sail with me, all the way. Will you not say it? Will you be forcing me to destroy you? Then I'll be alone, Ben. These men with us—what are they but phantoms, all of 'em? Knife 'em, they'd bleed smoke—not blood, Ben—smoke, and drift away downwind. None aboard but you and me, now that's no lie...."

But Ben, for sheer pity and disgust, terror and bewilderment, self-blame and homesickness and again pity, could not speak at all, and Shawn moved away, himself like smoke, past another black shadow by the mizzen that must have heard all he said; at this Shawn snarled: "If the wind changes, Mr. Marsh, you needn't be calling me—I shall know it."

Under Ben's hand beautiful Diana ran southward, cutting away the miles with a timeless whisper at her bow; but during the night the wind fell off, the air growing dull, silent, and in the morning dead. The sun rose on sails become slack, bemused in idleness on a mirror sea.

"I wondered, in fact, that she had not long ago destroyed herself in one of those seizures."

"They seldom do, Reuben, though often they injure themselves. She is nearly forty, that woman we saw today—I've known her bite her tongue and bruise herself, but nothing worse. As a rule they die somewhat young. It's as well you saw her so—the condition is not too rare and you'll encounter it again."

"And the books?"

"Have nothing to offer but speculation and bad advice. Nothing I've tried ever had the slightest effect.... What's that?—I mean the one that called from back there in the pasture."

"Red-winged blackbird."

"I wish I knew 'em all, the way you do."

"Brought up with 'em in the wilderness, Amadeus. But nobody could know them all.... Do the books tell anything of the cause?"

"Nothing worth your notice. Speculation, most of it not based on clinical observation. And (as you suggest) without at least some knowledge of immediate causes, treatment's only a blind groping. We must try it of course, because sometimes a guess is correct. But somehow we must also push back along the chain of causes—widen the area of light—somehow.... As you may or may not know, there are many going about in the world far madder than that poor epileptic, who is not really mad at all but merely drops into her fit from time to time, and usually comes out of it unharmed. A fearful thing to watch, Ru—I dare say you still feel it in your stomach. But some of the forms of madness that don't so loudly announce themselves are much worse."

"The world may be a mad place, Amadeus, but there go the peeper frogs. I told you they might, on such an afternoon."

"So they do. You don't suppose——?"

"If we continue to the pond, they'll stop. However, should we then squat patient in our boots, the thing might be done—imitating boulders, you know. We might, as it were, rock ourselves into the semblance of a natural outgrowth."

"Who now hath plumbed the depths of a contumelious paronomasia?"

"Ha!"

"That log looks more comfortable."

"If the ants on it are black, yes. If red, no."

"They look black, the few I see. Is there a difference?"

"Oh, my friend! How did you survive till I came to you?"

"Don't know."

"Yes, they're black.... By the madder ones, you mean the raving kind? Those with wild delusions?"

"Those, and others. I was thinking of the quieter sort, who are seldom called mad. Men and women eaten up with suspicion. So that—I think you've never encountered this, but beware of it if you do—so that everything happening within their purview must be bent to the shape of that suspicion; and to hear them talk you'd suppose the whole world was allied in conspiracy against them. I'd guess that such a state of mind is begotten of a most fearful vanity. And what evil is commoner than vanity? Of course that particular sickness of the mind is only one of its fruits. How seldom do you find anyone who hath ever attempted to look on his own life with something like the eye of eternity! But without at least some detachment, vanity is bound to grow."

"As for example the seeming humility of proper Christians?"

"Oh, that, yes—but don't trouble thyself too much about that. It would seem they need it. Well, and there are those madder ones devoured by jealousy, spite, greed, and fears of a hundred kinds, mostly groundless. It's no-way true that all is vanity, but I think you may say that vanity is the source of nearly all the saddest things in human nature. Nay, I think our poor wench with the fits, by comparison with many respectable souls, is quite sane."

"And so what is madness?"

"Do thou tell me, thou who gavest me once a definition of health that serves me still."

"A—a gross exaggeration of some natural activity of the mind? 'Lilies that fester....'"

"I'm pleased I made thee discover the Sonnets. Yes, that might serve.... But the hunger for verifiable knowledge—now there's an activity of the mind, natural I think, but sluggish or nonexistent in most men, and in a few like thee and me, very intense: are we then mad?"

"If such hunger for knowledge became painful or annoying to others, Amadeus, I am sure we would be called mad."

"Mm-yas—thought I'd caught thee, but (as usual) I'm caught instead. So consider—would you say there are any activities of the mind that would not deserve the name of madness if sorely exaggerated?"

"Maybe none. That hunger for knowledge could become a thing I'd call madness, if the pursuit of it caused a man to neglect too many other matters—such as sunlight and peeper frogs and Charity's pictures and the brightness of a swallow flying."

"I'll agree. I dare say anything out of proportion may become a madness. Even generosity. Even love."

"But Amadeus, I do ever think that love is not a thing, but more like a region where we travel. Something of that I said once to Ben. I can't remember when it was, and he may not have understood it—I'm sure I said it badly. Like a region, where we travel with—oh, some vision, some of the time. As sleep is like a region, and waking. Do I still say it badly, Amadeus? I mean that no one can give his friend a handful of sunlight, but may walk in it with him, and so love him."

After scant and haunted sleep, Ben woke to stillness where motion should have been. Stumbling up on deck long before the beginning of the forenoon watch, he saw Shawn on the quarterdeck deep in a stillness of his own, ignoring Tom Ball who muttered at him, and Joey Mills who stood by the helm but had nothing to do there, for the Diana had lost all way, the sails were dead rags, and if some profound current still moved her there was nothing to tell of it in this deathlike air under a brazen sun.

Ben remained forward, to avoid Shawn. Matthew Ledyard was lounging near the bow with nothing to do. His stare was not unfriendly; he even wished Ben a laconic good morning. Maybe he wanted to break his custom and share a word or two out of his permanent gloom. Like Ben, in these tropic days Ledyard had discarded shirt and jacket, wearing nothing above his belt but a kerchief around his head to moderate the sun and hold sweat out of his eyes. His gaunt chest was darkly tanned; it had never seemed to Ben that the purple splash on Ledyard's face was particularly ugly—once you grew used to it, it was a nothing, no more than another man's scar or mole. Unnecessarily Ledyard said: "We're in for a calm."

For several days a carrion reek had corrupted the air of the forecastle, and the murky hell-hole of the galley where French Jack prepared his strange offerings. Likely more barrels of the salt cod had gone bad and ought to be hunted out. Mr. Ball claimed the whole dirty cargo was spoiled and should be heaved overside, but French Jack explained that cod smelt that way anyhow; in spite of the pride of a Boston man, Ben was inclined to agree. With no breeze to sweep the nastiness away, the stench overhung the deck also, as though the Diana herself were exhaling corruption in a mortal sickness. To come up into this from the fetid forecastle was for Ben like waking to a continuation of nightmare. He was in a mood to fume and curse at anyone—particularly at Shawn, and that not for the large and just reasons, but simply for a certain standing order that forbade any of the hands to sleep on deck. For Ledyard, however, Ben managed a smile and a grunt of agreement. "Hope I may spend some of my trick aloft."

"Ay—stinks, don't it?" And Ledyard startled Ben exceedingly by adding: "Like a dead man's dream it is. A fair hope gone rotten."

Ben grew alert. Ledyard had never said anything like that to him before. "Maybe it'll be as bad at the masthead. This morning I believe we could stink out Father Neptune himself. Is no one aloft?"

"I was. Captain called me down. Seems dem'd foolish even to him to keep a lookout now—if we're becalmed so's everything else that might be about." He glanced aft and continued, a murmur in his smallest voice: "Cory, him and Mr. Ball was just now speaking of breaking out the boat and towing her. Understand that? Take at least six men at the oars to move her. Six men in a boat, in this sun, nothing to their bellies but p'ison stew or salt cod.... Step further away from the hatch, will you?" He lounged away to the bow, and Ben followed him as casually as he might, noticing how, with no way on her at all, the Diana had at some time since the wind died turned completely about, her lifeless bow pointing homeward to the north. Ben stood with the blaze of the morning sun behind him and watched the fire of it on the battlefield of Ledyard's face. "You might say, Cory, if so be he wants to kill all us mis'able scrannel hands, us buggerly rascals, that's what he'll do. Just get us out there at the oars in the sun, to tow the old bitch, that's all it needs." His browned sturdy arms spread out along the rail, Matthew Ledyard looked much like a man crucified, his dark face unflinching in the sun. "And I wonder would you be out there too—Mister Cory? Pulling an oar? With your charmed young life, so even the tropic sun won't strike you down? Or back here on the deck belike, so to sail with Captain Shawn when the rest of us is maybe dried up and burnt too black to stink? Or will you now be trundling aft to tell the Captain what old Ledyard said to you?"

Ben dropped his hand on the man's iron wrist. It did not move away. Ledyard's intense stare did not seem to be one of wrath, for all his words. "I have never carried tales to Shawn and you know it."

"Ya-ah—maybe I do know it. Maybe I wished to learn if you could ever be angered any way at all."

"I can." Ledyard's heavy brows lifted; his brown eyes in the sun squeezed down to little fires. "I can, and since you're a-mind to speak to me at last, I'll say this: the hope was never fair, it was rotten in the beginning, and I told him so. He lets me live because he imagines he can change me into one like himself, no other reason. He cannot. As for me, I swallow the puky food and haul on the ropes and jump to Marsh's orders because I wish to live, no other reason. I'm not Shawn's man."

"Whose then?"

"My own."

"That'd be the hard thing to prove in the sight of God."

"And you shall be your own man, nothing less."

"Shall I so?" Ledyard winced heavily and turned his face away from the beating of the sun at last, but Ben tightened his grip. "How could that be, now? You don't know, boy, you don't know——"

"Why, I say it shall be."

"And who a devil's name are you? A boy—a——"

"Benjamin Cory, son of Joseph Cory of Deerfield, adopted son of Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury, who owns this ketch. Look back at me!"

Ledyard did so, plainly with great effort—changed; certainly without wrath, perhaps even without curiosity. It seemed to Ben that what he must say was only something that Ledyard would surely have been saying to himself, and for a long time. "You will believe it, Matthew Ledyard, so now listen to me. She is not the old bitch. She is the ketch Artemis out of Boston, and the man who's a second father to me, whom you served well for nearly the length of my life—he had a hand in designing her. My brother and I climbed about on her ribs when she was a-building up the Mystic River—you were there. Since those days I have loved her, as Kenny's vessel and mine, sir, mine—and you were her carpenter, and Peter Jenks is her captain." Ledyard groaned at the sound of that name and jerked his hand away and pounded it on the rail. Ben reached out quickly and tapped his purple cheek. "Look back at me, I say! Chips—what's the name of this ketch?"

"The ketch is the Artemis," he said, harshly and choking on it. "Step away from me, Cory, or they'll notice us from the quarterdeck."

Ben did so, instinct urging him to wait, to look away, to lounge at the bow in the semblance of idleness till Ledyard's whisper came: "What will you do?"

"Who would be with us?"

Dubiously the whisper said: "Joey Mills. But he's old and puny."

"Are you sure of him?"

"Sure enough. We—have spoke of it. But——"

"I've seen him wear a pistol sometimes. I suppose he could use it?" Ledyard grunted. "I suppose he might even bear a message from me to Captain Jenks?"

"Oh, my God!... You mean it, don't you?"

"I will ask you to cease doubting it. Now, how many men would it require, to get Artemis home to Boston?"

"God!... Three or four hands could do it somehow." He sounded calmer. Glancing at him again, Ben found his face no less a battlefield, even more perhaps, but it had grown sharp with intelligence. "On such a thing as that, Mr. Cory, you'd be obliged to play it timid, understand me? Reef in at the first hint of dirty weather, if you'll take an old seaman's word for it. Comes fast, do you see? You remember we rode out a bad one off Grenada last year, and it was all hands hop to it, and even then it near-about caught us. Now imagine two or three men trying to get her snug in the time we did it then! Remember you got to keep one at the helm. All the same—all the same, sir, three or four hands could do it. That—is your intention?"

"It's my intention to try. What about Dummy?"

"Shawn's dog. Jack's another dog, a mad one."

"That's mostly show, I think. It makes others let him alone."

"Maybe, but don't trust him, Mr. Cory. He's not—with us."

"Manuel?"

"Can neither fight nor hold his tongue.... If you—if we can take care of Shawn and the others, you would release the Captain?"

"Certainly."

"Then I ... Mr. Cory, I'll beg you for your word on a—on two things, if I may."

"What?"

"If we can do it, and if Captain Jenks is free, put in a word for me. Let him know that whatever else I did, I tried to change back to what I was. Let him know I went back. Those would be the words, Mr. Cory. Say to him, if so be I can't say it myself, say that Matthew Ledyard went back."

"I will."

"And one other thing. If we can do it, then when we raise the Cape or—my God, better if it might be Rhode Island, but I suppose there's no hope of that—aid me, if you can, to get away in the boat. It's a thing, Mr. Cory—I've got a fear I wouldn't hang decent. Sooner drown. Would it sit fair with your conscience to help me run for it? Would you do that much, if I can help you in this thing?"

Ben said: "It sticks in my conscience that hanging never mended anything, and I will do that if I can. It'll mean deceiving Captain Jenks, helping you steal the boat, but I will do it. Matthew Ledyard, I'm eighteen, with less than a year at sea against the many that you've served. Can you take orders from me?"

Wonderingly, Ledyard said: "Yes, sir, I can."

"Bide the time then. It will be soon. I must speak with Mills and do one or two other things."

Ben spoke quickly—already he heard the commotion of Dummy lurching up from the forecastle with his monkey, and he was dizzy with the first full understanding of what had taken place. Well, damn it, I was wishing to make things happen!... As he moved away from Ledyard the man's whisper followed him: "Don't forget, those are the words, Mr. Cory—Matthew Ledyard went back...."

The monkey had begun to ail when the fruit gave out, after the Diana left the Bahamas, although she had endured other periods of poor eating without harm. This morning she looked half dead in the great hairy cradle of Dummy's arms. Dummy squatted with her at the foot of the mainmast, crooning hopelessly. Sometimes in the last few days she had swallowed a bit of sea biscuit if Dummy chewed the miserable stuff first to soften it. This morning she would not, but only shivered in spite of the sullen heat and twisted her wise black head away from the repulsive mass. Ben on his way aft paused to consider them, aware that of the two sorrowful ape-faces, Dummy's held the greater pain. The little black beast was merely dying.

She had been lively and delighted with her new home after her capture from the Schouven, learning every corner of the ketch—including the galley, where she could engage in shrieking encounters with French Jack. Since she returned continually, and never got anything there except missiles and rhetoric unsuited to the tender sex, Ben deduced that because of her streak of hoyden she must relish war for its own sake. Jack never once scored a hit. Best of all she loved soaring in dizzy flights all over the rigging, and hanging by her tail from the crosstrees to contemplate the sky and the ocean and the ways of man. She would come quickly down out of that for Dummy if he smacked his lips, but not for anyone else—except, occasionally and with the air of granting a favor, for Ben.

Now it seemed likely that her airy journeys were ended. Dummy gazed up at Ben with the grieving eyes of an ape-mother, and Ben could find nothing worth saying, but touched his finger to the tiny black bullet head that paid him no heed. Dummy smiled in his loose bewildered way, and Ben moved on.

Joey Mills was scuttling down the short companion ladder. Ben wished to detain him, but Shawn had noticed Ben and called to him. Ben whispered hastily: "I've spoke with Ledyard—he'll inform you what passed between us. Tell him I said he was to do so—and wipe that surprise off your face, quick!" Ben climbed to the quarterdeck, not glancing back to see how much Joey had understood. Shawn in this reeking glare of morning light looked old. No wrinkle, no scar of smallpox was spared, and none of the white dust at his temples. His hand had a fine tremor and he needed shaving.

"Mr. Ball," he said in a voice of weariness, "go below and get your breakfast."

"Yea, sir—but it be'n't yet eight bells, and you'm not eat a bite since yesterday noontime."

Shawn spoke with ugly patience: "I said go, and will I be explaining? I wish to speak with Cory alone."

"Yea, sir." Ball made a vague motion at his forelock, and waddled past Ben with a glance of remote dislike, muttering under his breath.

Shawn watched Ball's back out of sight. "Even he would desert me, had he anywhere to go. He was not so fat and sullen when he sailed with John Quelch—and escaped Quelch when I did—and listened when I told him of the western sea, and seemed, like you, to be understanding it. I suppose time's gone over all of us, and I alone faithful to the vision. Did I not say they were all phantoms, all but you and me?"

"You wished to speak with me?"

"Cold, cold. It's the cold good morning I get from you."

"Did Judah Marsh have visions, Mr. Shawn?"

"Oh, Ben, Ben! Marsh is a tool to be used, a thing with a cutting edge in the shape of a man. And Manuel is a lump of muscle, a sort of poor engine for pulling ropes, in the shape of a man, and Dummy another, with hardly even the shape. They're all phantoms, all but you and me."

"At this moment, your thing with hardly the shape of a man is grieving like a mother over his pet that's like to die in a day or so."

"So? Well, what should that be to you?"

"Much, I find, Mr. Shawn. And I suppose no one ever found it comfortable to cease being a boy."

"Hm? Your mind's running in strange courses. Maybe it's true you've come to be something like a man. Wisha!" said Shawn, and tried to smile—"nearly as tall as me, now that's no lie." His hand came out in an abortive gesture of friendship, and fell to his side. "Dummy, Ben, is what I made him. I found him on your foul Boston water front, sweeping and carrying garbage in a warehouse. I sat down by him with a length of rope and showed him sailor's knots, and he grinned and took the rope and showed me he knew them too. Then, seeing he knows well what you say for all he can't speak, I told him of the new countries in the western sea, and the vision did strike fire in him—Mother of God, I saw it! Plainer, more honest than I've seen it in many a man who hath all his wits and the power of speech. And I said to him: 'Will you sail with me then?' And he knelt in the filth of the warehouse and patted my boots. Poor lump, have I not given him vision and purpose? Could I heal his dirty monkey for him I would do it, now that's no lie. But I am not God, Ben—only God's instrument. Now take this glass. It's there, Ben, but when I try to bring the glass on it I lose it—it must be my eyes or this damned blaze of light—yet without the glass I see it. Why, even Ball saw it, but would have it a floating tree. A floating tree!" said Shawn with thin bitterness, and smiled, and held out the spyglass.

Very far away it was, a dark smudged line at the angle of a rakish sail, miles away over a flat sea where nothing stirred—no, something did stir out there as Ben took the glass, a black triangle of fin cruising in calm perhaps a quarter-mile to starboard, but Shawn was not concerned with that, and Ben paid it no heed as he sought to bring the distant shape under the power of the lens.

Ball was right. In the glass it was quite plainly a floating tree-trunk, felled or uprooted by storm maybe a long time ago and swept here by the whims of wind and current from God knew where. A single branch stood upright at that deceiving angle; a heavier one submerged must have been overbalancing it.

Ben was remembering an April afternoon when Artemis came into Boston harbor, and Faith stood beside him, and Daniel Shawn also was someone new, both admirable and good. He was remembering certain acts of kindness, of almost incredible forbearance, chess games, lessons with the sextant, jests and tall stories told in moments of relaxation during the long armed truce, and told without any overtones of madness or evil. He was remembering above all the magic of a voice, and how the vision it generated had stirred his own spirit with all the rocketing enthusiasm of a boy and the more sober acceptance of a man—for surely, no matter what madness and evil there were in Shawn, it was still as true as sunrise that there must be new lands in the western sea, and some day those would be discovered, and one could fairly trust (as Shawn said) that all men's life on earth would be the richer for it. Remembering all this, it seemed wholly impossible to Ben that he could actually do what he now intended. He prayed for at least a little time of delay, and hesitantly said: "Mr. Shawn, it seems we've swung full about during the calm this morning. By the sun, I make it that our stem here is pointed near due south, and so——"

"And the sail is southwest by west, and when I saw it last night it was northwest, but Mother of God, Ben, I make nothing much of that. They could have made a better run in the night than we did before the wind fell away. Even if they be common men aboard her, that's possible. The great thing—ah, have you sometimes thought me mad, Ben, until now?—the great thing is, you see it too, and so you know I am not deluded. Now give me back the glass. I'll try once more if I can't find her in it."

Ben knew he must no longer delay, or he could not do the thing at all. He said: "The marks on her side will be the letters of her name—must be mighty large to show at such a distance, I cannot quite make them out, except there are three, and then a space, and then a D. The next after the D may be a Y."

"Give me the glass!" Shawn snatched it and held it to his eye, but with such wildly shaking hands that surely he would find nothing in it. The sight of such weakness sickened Ben, yet at the same time gave him a sense of his own power overwhelming as a wave, and of amazement that he could ever have feared this man Shawn, or believed Shawn to be stronger than himself.

Shawn's struggle with the spyglass was not prolonged. Something—possibly sweat on his hands—caused the glass to slip and fall to the deck with a sharp tinkle of breakage. Ben thought: Something broke in me then, and when he dies something in me will die and no help for it. He would have retrieved the glass for Shawn, but Shawn stooped quickly, blood suffusing his face, and leaned at the rail fumbling at it aimlessly, though he must have known when a shard of broken glass fell from his fingers that the thing was smashed beyond saving. "And didn't I know last night that I must meet them in a calm? And alone. I was not told I would be blind also."

"Mr. Shawn——"

"Blind!" Shawn said, and hurled the spyglass far out over the flat water, toward the black blade that calmly cruised in its wide circuit of the motionless Diana.

"Mr. Shawn, Peter Jenks would speak for me, if I may enter the cabin. Merely the sight of me would make him speak. Does he know I am aboard?"

"What? He knows it. I told him long ago you were one of us."

"Then you told him a lie, for I have never been one of your crew and well you know it."

"But you will be," said Shawn, not commandingly but in pleading, almost in pathos, and took hold of Ben's arm. "You will be."

Ben met the blue stare, knowing how in many ways it was truly blind, and shook his head. "I can make Jenks speak, Mr. Shawn. You wish him to speak, do you not?"

"What? Why, he must, if only to confess the sin. It's a very great sin to steal a man's dream. I'd compel no man to die in it."

"What if he never did so, Mr. Shawn?"

Shawn let go his arm. "You question the voice that guides me?"

"Did your voice tell you of the coming of that sloop?"

"I am not God. I am not told everything."

"A sloop bearing Jan Dyckman's name, a sloop that seems now to be moving, Mr. Shawn, in a flat calm where we find no breath of wind at all? But we might be moving presently. Will you look over there—sir?"

Shawn swung about to gaze where Ben pointed, to the northeast. There—no illusion—a faint blackish smudge was visible on the horizon, with a slight hazing in a small area of the burning sky. Shawn turned back to Ben a face transfigured. "Why, there's the answer! Let it come down on us, and we'll outrun them to the ends of the earth. Can you doubt me now? What's that you were asking? Oh, Jenks, Jenks. You may not go in the cabin, Ben, not yet. But sure he'll speak now, and I seeing to it. A word of that sloop and he'll speak, the Devil willing, if I must cut out his damned tongue and let it wag alone." Shawn strode down the quarterdeck laughing—not in music but with shrillness, high and thin, almost an old man's laugh. "Let it come down! D'you hear, Ben? D'you hear?—I say, if that squall comes down on us, Mother of God, we'll not reef one inch of sail, I'll hang the man that tries it. Let it come down, we'll go about and run south for Hell or Heaven, or the western sea, or the dark!"

When Ben reached the companion ladder Shawn had already entered the cabin. Ben heard the door crash, the rattle of the key.

Ben hurried forward, where a voice was crackling and spitting in the lifeless air. Ben had glimpsed Manuel climbing to the masthead; Marsh must have sent him up, not knowing the standing order had been revoked. Tom Ball would be still below, and French Jack serving him what passed for breakfast. Joey Mills and Ledyard had not gone below to eat but stood together near the bow, tightly watching the black scarecrow Judah Marsh, and Dummy with his sick monkey.

Dummy had backed away from Marsh to the rail, shaking his head and moaning. "So throw it over, d'you hear, or will I do it? You've had the dirty Jonah long enough. Wish us to stay beca'med forever? Don't make out you can't understand me, you pig's get, you know every word I say. Throw it over!" But Dummy, who could squeeze no further away from him, began a desperate sidling down the deck, his twisted back pressed against the rail, the monkey whimpering at his shaggy breast.

Coming up behind, Ben said: "Stop that, Marsh!"

The man swung fast, a glare of total amazement above his smile as though he did not know the voice, and doubtless he did not, since Ben had never before in his life spoken in such a tone. "You? I'll take care of you presently." A long arm snaked out, snatching the monkey from Dummy's embrace by a miniature wrist.

Marsh flung her over the side. She made no outcry; only the lightest splash. She surfaced in the mildly rippled water, feebly beating at it, her black button of head scarcely clear of it, already near to death, unable to swim, an atom of life useless and helpless. Dummy had turned automatically, stunned, to watch the arc of her falling. "Now then!" said Marsh, and grabbed at the mute's arm.

The arm surged upward at the touch, a motion like brushing at a fly—Dummy did not look at the man, only at the struggle in the water, too hypnotized by it even to moan or shake his bulging head. But the brushing motion was enough to send Marsh reeling across the deck. He fetched up squealing in the scuppers, his left leg bent under him. His knife was out. Ben saw his leg give way once; then he was upright, advancing slowly and with great care, the blade flat in his hand, swinging from side to side. The monkey sank out of sight. Dummy turned then, and saw Marsh. Head lowered, arms dangling to his ankles, he saw Marsh, and understood, and charged him in a shambling rush.

Joey Mills and Ledyard had not moved.

The monkey broke the surface once more in some last spurt of strength and stubborn hunger for life. Ben slipped out of his trousers and tossed them to Ledyard. "Chips, mind my knife!" He was free of his shoes and climbing naked over the rail.

He gave himself time for a glance out over the still water. The black fin was there, yes, but not too perilously near, he thought—maybe a hundred yards off, and moving away, cutting the water slowly astern of the Diana. The small commotion of the monkey's fall must have gone unnoticed, or the shark would have had her in an instant.

Ben gave himself time for one other glance, backward. Marsh had no knife. Dummy's chest was dripping blood, but the knife lay several feet away. Dummy was over Marsh, a knee on his chest, one fearsome hand closed around his throat, and Marsh was not struggling. His neck was probably broken already; the black eye-patch dangled over his ear; neither eye would see anything more, and the smile was gone.

Joey Mills inside the rail was chattering. "Don't dive, Ben, for God's sake don't! Leave me throw the brute a rope." He had one in his quick little hands, had made it fast to the rail.

"Don't heave it, Joey—let it down." Ben could make out the shoe-button dots of eye. They were fixed and possibly blind. "She could never find it," Ben said. The motion of her arms had almost ceased; she could make no progress through the water. Ben caught the rope and let himself down without a splash, gauged his distance from her, and struck out under water, eyes open.

He found the black shadow of her body and emerged beside her, about to reach for her, but she had life enough yet to grab at him. He turned his head to save his eyes. He felt the clutch of midget fingers in his hair, the scrabble of her legs at his shoulders, and he swam for his life.

Ledyard's wild yell aided him. Until he caught the noise of it he had been concerned only with his need to complete the act, having no time at all to be afraid. The yell brought him sharp knowledge of death, and the one more ounce of speed required to defeat it. He found and seized the rope, and swung with a final burst of violence into safety. Up here in his own element, clutching the rail with Dummy's monkey secure in his other arm, he could look down in time to see not only the black fin lancing toward him from astern but another shape of the same breed, a vast gray hunger shimmering upward from the abyss, shifting to dull silver, cutting water harmlessly at the Diana's side and surging unappeased away.

Dummy stumbled over the deck bleeding from the long gash across his ribs. He blinked in love and fear at the naked god and fell to his knees, then forward to clasp Ben's foot and roll his forehead over it.

"Don't! I pray you, don't!—here, take her! But I fear she'll die, Dummy—I could only bring her back." Dummy reached up for her. Ledyard at Ben's elbow was muttering something about his britches. "In a moment," said Ben. "Mind the hatch, you and Joey. I don't want Jack and Ball coming up yet if we can stop them." He knew somehow without a glance that they would do as he directed. He crossed the deck to the black heap of strangely inoffensive carrion. It seemed to him—outside and apart from this incredibly violent new self of Ben Cory—that his only impulse was to discover whether he could lift that gangling weight. He could, and with astonishing ease. A limp stick, nothing more, a stick with hanging legs and spiritless head and a bad smell. Needlessly he crossed with it back to the starboard side. "The fish will be hungry," he said, and heaved it over. He gripped the rail with both hands, and watched.

They were hungry. Ben watched, thinking not of Jan Dyckman nor of justice nor of the long year ending; thinking only that quiet must presently arrive when this was over, and that in his home country it would be spring. The young apple tree by the kitchen garden—might that be in bloom this morning, and Reuben there to see it? The water briefly boiled in muddy red, and sent its diminishing ripples to infinity, and was still.

Ledyard was tugging at his hand, which could now release its grip on the rail, and urgently shoving something into it—the handle of Ben's knife. "Look to yourself—he's coming!"

Daniel Shawn was framed in the cabin doorway, blankly staring. He could certainly see them all—Joey and Ledyard now by the open forward hatch, Dummy squatting in the shadow of the mainmast cherishing his dying companion, Ben naked at the rail, the knife his father gave him unsheathed and brilliant in the sun. Shawn closed the cabin door and came a step away from it. He remembered; drew out the key from under his shirt and turned his back on all of them, carefully locking the cabin. Then he was advancing, astonishment giving way to some partial understanding, savage and cold. He glanced aloft.

Ben did so too, having almost forgotten Manuel. Manuel was frozen at the masthead, gazing down. Manuel must have seen it all. Ben guessed that not even a roar from Shawn would bring him down at this moment, and Ben was aware of having laughed.

"Well?" Shawn came forward another step or two. "Well? What's this disorder, and thou naked and shameless?"

"Why," said Ben, "this is the garment and shield I wore when I came into the world, as they say, and one day I'll die wearing it, maybe not today. It's my intention to live a long while, after this ketch is returned to Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."

"Mutiny," said Shawn quietly. His head canted to one side, a danger sign. He had stood so, without a word, when the body of Cornelius Barentsz was cut in quarters and tossed to the sharks. Then as now, the copper farthing had appeared in his left hand, twisting and sparkling. It caught the sun this morning, sending lances of sharp light at Ben's eyes, and Ben turned his knife until it shot the same small cruel messages to Shawn, who winced and briefly turned his face away. "Judah!"

"He can't run any more of your errands. He's sharks' meat, five minutes past. Don't be calling the others and disturbing their breakfast."

"This from you.... Ben, you shall have part of your wish. You shall go in the cabin, immediate. I order you to go there, and here is the key." He took it from under his shirt and tossed it across the deck.

Ben made no motion for it, watching its fall with the corner of his eye. "Joey," he said, "take that key and open the cabin. Tell Captain Jenks that if fortune favors me I'll come to him presently with the key to his leg irons. Tell him, Joey, I am hoping to redeem a year of my life that in folly and weakness I threw away. Tell him that, and return here at once to me."

The key had fallen near to Ben. Joey Mills did not need to pass close to Shawn in order to retrieve it. Small, old and terrified, he was sidling for it when Shawn bellowed: "Joey Mills, do you take orders from a bare-naked child and not from your captain?"

Mills leaped and fluttered like a hurt sparrow. But he had the key, and scuttled to larboard, intending a quick rush aft along by the larboard rail as far from Shawn as he could get. Shawn was wearing no pistols, only his short knife. Ben said: "He won't harm you, Joey. His business is with me, not with you. If he tries to stop you, Ledyard and I will both help you."

"Dummy!" Shawn called that name not in command but in pleading. But even as he spoke, Dummy sobbed once, wetly and loudly, and shambled away up to the bow. Ben glimpsed the monkey's head flopping limp, and the spidery arms. She must have died, and Dummy must have known the moment—yet up there at the bow Dummy was still trying to support her head and make it live.

"Shawn, you spoke of these men as phantoms. Only some of them are that. I think your Judah Marsh was a phantom, and so likely he made a thin meal for the fish. Mills there is a man, and Matthew Ledyard, and Dummy. Men are creatures you've never understood, never. I can see that now. Myself, I begin, just a little, to understand them.... Joey has opened the cabin. Needn't trouble to look behind you. Take my word for it, and now give me that other key."

Shawn did not look behind him. He drew his own knife, slowly, without threat, and leaned his back against the mainmast. "Compassed about.... Ben—why, why? Why must it be so?... And if I do not give you that other key?"

"Then I must take it."

"With that knife. You'll use that knife against the man who would have given you the key to a whole new world."

"Yes."

"Were we not to go there together, Ben?"

"Certainly I dreamed that once myself, before Jan Dyckman was found dying in a dirty alley. And afterwards too, until I learned why he had to lie there."

"Did I not give you the vision?"

"Yes."

"And see it strike fire in you?"

"Yes."

"As I never saw it in any other.... Have I not been kind?"

"Yes."

"Forbearing too? Forgiving a thousand things I'd never take from any other man?"

"Yes."

"But you will use the knife. Have we not spoke together a thousand times like friends? Haven't I made you laugh?"

"Yes."

"But you will use it.... Why?"

"Shawn, do you think I could walk into Heaven across the flesh of Jan Dyckman? Dyckman and others—how many? The men of the Schouven—how many, Shawn? And how many more, before we ever saw the new lands?"

"Does it matter? The vision is greater than the man."

"Nay, I think not, but even let that be so if you wish. But if you follow the vision through blood and deceit, in mad denial of what your senses tell you, then you lose it. Maybe the vision is there yet, but you're mired down in your own folly. You're lost.... Shawn, you're truly compassed about, as you say." Ben raised his voice, knowing that in this windless air it must reach into the open cabin, if Jenks was in any condition to hear it. "Mills and Ledyard and Dummy are with me. Manuel won't fight for you. If Jack or Tom Ball would come on deck, they must pass my friends there at the hatch. I don't wish to fight you, Shawn, nor to harm you. We were friends. I know what you gave me and I value it. But you're lost. You're mired, and I will not go down with you. Now hear the alternatives. If you——"

"I see," said Shawn, perhaps to himself. "I see you will not go with me, the way I should have known it all the while."

"Shawn"—Ben understood that he himself was pleading—"Shawn, there are those who love me, or there were. My life is more to them than ever it was to you. You never knew me. You never saw me. You saw the image of a follower, and that you may have loved, but me you never saw. Now then—my life is all I own. I'm naked in every way. And if you'd take that from me I'll fight you to the last breath, and I'll win. Now hear the alternatives. Throw your knife away and give me that other key. Then, sir, I will not release Captain Jenks until he gives me his word that he will take you unharmed to Boston."

"To man's justice!" said Shawn, and laughed. "No hearing. The short gasp on the tricing line and all vision dead!"

"Men know little enough about justice, that's true. And so I'll give you another alternative. If you will yield, I'll even set you free in a boat when we raise the Cape—as you could have done for me a year ago when I told you plain I'd have no part of your venture."

In dark astonishment, Shawn appeared to be considering that a while. His gaze wandered over the deck. Certainly he would be understanding the open cabin behind him, and whatever Mills and Ledyard were doing at the hatch—Ben could not turn his head to look—and Dummy up there at the bow, shut away in a private world of grief. "Your friend Peter Jenks would never be consenting to such a thing at all."

"He would. His first duty is to Mr. Kenny and to the Artemis. To carry out that duty he must be free of the leg irons. If I say he cannot be free until he gives me his word to let you go, he will give it, and he will keep his word."

"He will not. I know his kind."

"You know nothing of him. You see all men, including me, through your fog of ambition and vanity—and visions.... Well, a third alternative—nay, I can't put that in words."

"To turn this knife against myself?" Shawn's eyes were all black. The copper farthing had been put away. He was shifting lightly from one foot to the other. Ben caught some blurred noise from the forward companionway, but could not turn to look. "I might even do it, Beneen, now that's no lie—if so be the voyage is ended, and wouldn't it be the lightest demand your tender heart has made of me? But Mother of God, I wonder a little what you can do with the pretty ketch, and I not here. Will you look to the northeast?"

Ben did so, a glance not so long as a heartbeat, taking in all that part of the horizon. The faint smudge had grown to a rolling wall of black, far away, maybe not so far. No least breath stirred here aboard or over the near waters still ardent under the sun, but the pressure of storm ached in Ben's eardrums, and over yonder, where the advancing shadow fell, the water, no longer beaten gold, wavered in a troubled darkness. So much Ben discovered in less than a heartbeat, and Shawn chose that moment to leap for him.

The knife was up and aiming for Ben's heart—flashing, perilous enough, intending death, but not shrewdly held as Judah Marsh would have held it, in the flat of the hand, circling and slicing.

To Ben the man's action seemed almost slow; clumsy, weary. He was able with amazing ease to catch the wrist of Shawn's right hand and force it away. His own was seized in the same moment, the blade only inches from Shawn's corded throat. Then indeed a slowness settled over them, a long straining, a silent tension like that of the nearing squall—it must break sometime, maybe not for a long while. Ben became a fighting machine, the power in his left arm sufficient to hold destruction away, the power in his right sufficient to maintain the ultimate threat, but—because of the quivering effort in Shawn's bent arm and because of a tortured reluctance in himself—he was not quite able to fulfill the threat, not quite able to drive the point the two or three inches more down into the soft pulsing spot in Shawn's neck where the life could drain away.

Locked so and waiting, Ben heard commotion break loose behind him. A yell, a shot, a tramp of loud struggling feet, a shrill hollow squeal that could only be French Jack's war cry, and then a different kind of yell from him—higher and thinner, maybe a scream of pain. Ben thought he heard some strangled cursing in Ledyard's voice. No way to learn about it. Nothing to do but hold the fighting machine to its cold purpose until it should win through or take a knife in the back.

It seemed to Ben that he knew, before it happened, everything that Shawn would try to do. Shawn shifted his feet, seeking to bring his boot down on Ben's bare foot. The foot was not there, and Shawn nearly lost his balance, regaining it with a groan of stormy breath—but Ben could still breathe deeply, evenly. After that, he knew, Shawn would not dare to try raising a knee to foul him. I am a little taller after all....

In chill calculation, the fighting machine forced Shawn aft by gradual steps. Behind Ben the noise went on, a thrashing and a snarling. Two men must be rolling about all over the forward deck—which two? Not Joey Mills—surely Mills could do nothing with bare hands against Jack or Tom Ball. It ought to be possible to turn about in this hideous embrace, at least long enough to see——

Ben jerked his right arm backward, hoping to throw Shawn off balance or at least to turn him.

It turned him, but in the swirling and writhing readjustment Shawn's knife found Ben's forehead and drew a hot line downward. Ben heaved at it long enough to save his eye. It returned, for that instant inexorable, gouging Ben's cheek in a lingering kiss of fury to the edge of the jaw. Then Ben's left hand could drive it away, and Shawn was down on his knees and his face was turning brilliant red. But that's my blood on him. Shawn was staring upward. "The color," he said. He was staring directly into Ben's eyes. "The color of the western sea." And his knife clattered on the deck.

Yet he was up on his feet once more, still pressing Ben's knife away, even forcing it downward a little, and the motionless deadlock continued. Weaponless and gasping, knowing defeat, Shawn would not yield. "It's over," Ben said. "Can't you understand?" He would not yield.

Ben's left eye clouded with blood from his forehead. The right eye could discover all things in brilliant detail. A small gray heap by the open hatch—Joey Mills, shot in the forehead. Up near the bow, Ledyard and Tom Ball in a tangle of tom clothes and flailing arms; Ledyard had him by the ears, beating his round head against the planks, and Ledyard's marred face was a great gash of grin. Nearer, a redheaded thing crawled aft inch by inch, holding a pistol, trailing a leg broken between knee and ankle. This thing should have been creeping and suffering in sunlight, but in the sky beyond it a blackness had done away with the sun, while over Ben's head had begun a dubious mutter of troubled canvas.

And only three or four feet away—Dummy, his head swaying from side to side on the blunt neck, moaning, unable to advance, or understand, or take part. Ben could understand that somehow. Dummy had two gods now, and the gods were destroying one another, and the world had fallen to bits while he clutched dead love in his tremendous arms.

Ben could not understand how there should again be huge noise behind him, now that he was facing forward and could see them all with his one unclouded eye, the living and the dead. Manuel? Never. The noise was metallic, a crashing jangle, and the repeated thud of some heavy object striking on the deck. He yelled: "God damn you, Shawn, give over!" Shawn might not have heard that. Shawn was staring fixedly over Ben's shoulder. Except for the grip on Ben's right wrist he was certainly relaxing, weakening fast. It was possible to swing him around again, and look aft, and understand.

With shackled ankles the giant could move in a horrible and careful hopping, the chain jerking behind him. He carried in his hand the three-foot plank that he had torn loose from the floor nails and all. His broad face was one whitened granite calm. Clear of the cabin doorway, he swayed for a time without support, observing—the wrathful sky, the full spread of sail fitfully trembling and stammering under the first warning gusts, the human deeds completed and not completed. His little blue eyes brilliant with all the pure cold of northern ice, he raised the plank, and balanced it, and hurled it.

But French Jack rolled his crawling body just clear of it, and leveled his pistol with some care. It crashed in the same moment that Jenks flung himself forward, and Jenks struck the deck still a yard or two from his enemy, blood seeping from his leg above the iron band. Jenks could crawl too. They would meet in a moment. The thunder of the shot had galvanized Shawn into a last effort, and Ben could watch no more, but he knew that the other thunder following was not from any human source.

That was in the sails, a roar of stricken canvas above a deck gone mad. Out of the torn sky the northeast wind with a booming outrage of rain fell upon Artemis, slapping her over on her beam ends. The twisted knots of human warfare rolled tight against the larboard rail, inches away from a suddenly boiling sea.

Pressed down in that inferno, his face cold, and still, and streaming with the flood of rain, Shawn forced Ben upward away from him, until his right hand could join his left in grasping Ben's right hand. Shawn was trying to speak above the uproar; Ben could not hear him. Ben felt the agonized living shudder of Artemis as a thing within himself, and then he saw, not believing it, that his knife had gone down, its blade hidden in the green cloth, buried to the hilt. Ben could not know, then or in all his life, whether Shawn's own hands had drawn the blade in upon himself, or whether this had been done by the wrenching struggle of Artemis in her extremity, or whether Ben's own right hand had sent it down and so blotted out in one motion all the hope and the madness, the cruelty, the blindness and the radiant visions, and the pain.