Hurricane Williams/Chapter 11

HAT evening cat's-paws began riffling the water, and Matt Ward in an ugly mood came on deck, perhaps feeling aggrieved that he had slept drunkenly through so much excitement. Anyway, he was savage.

The crew was kept box-hauling and grumbled viciously as they dragged the yards around.

At supper the starboard watch refused to touch the odorous mess. Headed by Old Tom it trooped to the galley and through the open top door he flung kid and contents with a hearty sea-blessing into the Chinese cook's face, making a dirty smear all over the galley and starting a Chinese commotion of shrill squawks and gesticulation.

The second Chinaman foolishly snatched up a butcher-knife.

The men poured into the galley sanctuary, driving fists and feet high and low. Some of them really tried to kill the “yellow bellies,” and beat them, knocked them, kicked them; not so much because of real hatred as because Chinamen are merely Chinamen and have no legitimate protest if white men feel like bruising and breaking them.

Besides, the crew had been hazed and strained until it was murderous and looked for pegs to hang grievances on. They had enough of both.

Every man, for instance, in the forecastle blasted Gorvhalsen with an unreasoning grudge for having urged McGuire to go over the side and narrowly miss being eaten by a shark.

McGuire himself had been invited aft by the devil to get drunk. It may have been that this special distinction caused them to envy his luck, and the envy expressed itself abortively in damning Gorvhalsen and making their own fare seem less endurable.

The port watch had growled wickedly over its food. The starboard let its inflamed feelings loose on the Chinks. The racket was deafening. The Jap boy was caught coming to the galley and smashed to the deck. He died next morning.

Ward bellowed and Juggins roared. Adams used a pin and his fists. The fight threatened to be general with the crew in mutiny. Ward broke out small arms for the mates and petty officers, the boatswain, old decrepit Sails and Chips. Two shots were fired. No one was hit. The crew quieted down dangerously. The breeze came up stronger. As soon as it was dark enough to shelter him, Dicer began bawling insultingly at the officers. He boasted in the forecastle of what he had said.

A squall an hour long hit the Heraldr, and after that the wind blew steadily. The afterguard was under arms through the night and the word was “shoot to kill.”

It was near one o'clock in the morning that Brundage's name was whispered and there was a hand's touch to shoulder. His eyes opened into narrow watchful slits. He did not move; just stared into the blurred shadow of a face marked by the lantern's glow.

All about men, like the restless dead in a catacomb awaiting the last trumpet, breathed heavily, puffed, groaned, snored. The sharp unclean odors of many sweating bodies together filled the warm sultry box-like deck-house.

“Jake! Come on deck.”

Low-voiced, Brundage replied:

“Go turn in. I don't want a drink.”

“Drink! I've nothin' to drink–smell my breath—not a drop.” With a whispering wail, a protest against self-folly, “I've been a fool!”

“Yes,” Brundage said impersonally, unenlightened but not doubting.

He slowly put his long legs over the edge of the bunk and began climbing out.

Something was wrong with McGuire; not a trace of liquor on his breath. He was agitated too. Brundage knew of nothing that could, or at least that ever had, unnerved him.

When Brundage, having paused to fill and light his pipe, went on deck, McGuire was taking short turns back and forth across the forecastle and made a grotesque figure with his dead black shirt and white canvas trousers that he had worn aft by way of dressing himself. Also he had shaved with Brundage's delicately edged razor; and Brundage had spent an hour afterward in honing it again. He loved a sharp edge on steel.

McGuire pulled him into the shadows; and with: “Here, give me that pipe,” took it from him, right out of his mouth, and placing it in his own, drew hard on the bitter strong tobacco. “You c'n have this—make you feel like a gentleman,” and he drew from his shirt pocket a long, thick cigar and handed it to Brundage, at the same time offering the glowing bowl of the pipe for a light. They drew on the tobacco in silence.

Brundage was imperturbably waiting. McGuire was gathering an accustomed composure out of the strong narcotic.

Overhead the sails pulled the Heraldr into long soothing rolls, and the watch on deck was continually being called to braces and sheets—kept busy.

Swanson wore a revolver in a holster that had the flap open and stayed on deck. He had to stand to his watches though his nose was broken and his face swollen, black and blue.

Some of the men soldiered. Clobb and Shring and Sam-O sat beside the galley out of sight from the poop and muttered with their heads together. If Swanson missed them he said nothing. They ordered others of the watch back into the waist if any came forward to loaf too. If others worked, they wouldn't be missed. They had things to talk over and their voices were not loud.

McGuire began abruptly as if he had been talking a long time and was warmed to his subject:

“Gin an' brandy, rum, wine, whisky, cordials. A great cool square-face o' gin. Holland gin, oily an' smooth. But—Jake, I hate women. They ruin a man's life for him!”

Brundage seemed to nod. He may only have bent forward to peer quickly at what he thought was a lurking figure. But the figure was not lurking; Monty came out of the shadows, scrutinized their faces to make sure who they were and passed on.

McGuire, with a tinge of plaintive self-scorn that did not hide a deeper and troubled feeling from the wise watchful Brundage, began to tell of what had happened. He did not admit, for there was little that was confessional in his nature, that he had been about as near as he ever was to embarrassment when he went into the cabin. Gorvhalsen had not invited, but had told him to come.

McGuire was a difficult person to fluster. He enjoyed novelty. He loved with a consuming passion the strong bitter flavors of Bacchic vessels, and the sense of having earned, or at least of having won in a dangerous gamble, all that he could get gave him encouragement.

The quarter-deck door was wide, and through that he had gone into the cabin. He saw no one but Chips, working away at some shelving in a port stateroom. The Swedish carpenter caught sight of him and thrust a long neck through the doorway, his ears extended like studding-sails. McGuire thought Chips had the face of a badly stuffed fish. He was goggle-eyed and open-mouthed. Having stared for a time, Chips asked in an impertinent whine what he was doing there.

“Mr. Gorvhalsen wants my opinion on Swedes as a race. I've come to give it.”

Chips gaped immobilely until the remark had circulated through his mind, then turned away, muttering something about its being too bad the shark hadn't bit somebody or other.

A starboard stateroom opened. Matt Ward came through the door.

He saw McGuire at once and pulled with one hand then the other at the long tips of his straw colored mustache. His eyes were red and angry; but he was not quite sure of their vision. He had an enormous capacity for whisky and had been using it; but he was perilously near to seeing brilliantly spotted creatures dancing roundelays head down from the deck.

“You there!” he said doubtfully.

McGuire faced him respectfully.

The movement must have reassured Ward as to his eyes. He promptly demanded what the hell McGuire was doing aft.

Chips again paused to stare. Ward's voice was penetrating.

“Mr. Gorvhalsen has”

“Get for'ard!” Ward ordered loudly.

“Aye, sir, for'ard,” said McGuire, but he did not move.

“D'you hear me, you?” Ward shouted, closing his fists and taking a step closer.

“Aye, aye, sir,” said McGuire, and moved—so as to place a large plush chair, solidly upholstered, between himself and the captain.

Mrs. Gorvhalsen came out of a starboard stateroom. She must have heard Ward and hurried. A silk scarf was about her shoulders and crossed concealingly on the unbuttoned front of her waist. But tall, gracious, poised, she showed no other trace of hurry. Her smile was the pleased, reassuring greeting of a hostess. As she extended her hand to McGuire she turned toward Matt Ward, whose red puffed face had astonishment on it.

“Mr. Gorvhalsen's guest this evening,” she said; but somehow without an air of explaining.

“Madam, I can't—I won't” he began.

He took another step forward, his face filling with dark blood. His tones did have the accent of explanation. He was earnest too; but his words did not come easily—

“Crew—bad—this thing—ship dis'pline—”

With a calmness so natural that it must have been real she replied evenly, unperturbed:

“You do not understand, Captain. Mr. Gorvhalsen has invited this young man.”

There was no shadow of impatience or dislike in her voice or manner; she was calmly gracious.

Ward turned abruptly on his heel and stamped off, going on deck where he started in to make things lively. A better man, or captain, than he would have been driven to drink, probably to murder; or if really an excellent fellow, perhaps to suicide.

Gorvhalsen was overpowering; and his whole conduct toward the captain was unheard of and intolerable, but largely unconscious. He did not ignore Ward any more than he ignored the steward, but scarcely thought one was more important than the other; and probably he would have hesitated in deciding which was the more valuable: the steward, likely as not, since it was doubtful if Gorvhalsen would have put up with drunkenness in his duties.

“Well,” said McGuire to Brundage in telling it, “I thought somebody'd give me a bottle an' say good-by. But what you get in this world you have to pay for; an', Jake, you pay most for what you don't get. When I looked round, there was that girl again.”

“The red one?” Brundage asked.

He must have been paying very close attention to care enough to have a question when McGuire paused.

“No. The white one. You know this tropic heat. At night a bud; next dawn a flower wide open. Some way or other she's been gettin' before my eyes from Honolulu on. An what I see, I look at. I've watched the frost melt an May come on her cheeks.”

Brundage made a contemptuous sound.

“Burr-r-r-r. Wait till you hear—you'll burr-r-r worse than that.”

There was not a great deal to hear as McGuire told it. He skimmed, scarcely touching at all the deep feeling that surged under the slight incidents; but Brundage was old and watchful.

For a few minutes McGuire had been left alone with Eve while Mrs. Gorvhalsen returned to her stateroom; and he was too observant and learned in the ways of evilness not to see love shining up at him from the radiant loveliness of the girl's young face. Had he been innocent as herself he would never have noticed.

Youth is timid of words, but writes its feelings on the face, unconsciously. He could read all that was there, and suddenly was disturbed away down in the hidden secret currents of his thought and feeling.

Through the stern stateroom door the booming voice of Gorvhalsen in some operatic passage could be heard as he idly dressed himself after the bath. The voice rumbled and leaped powerfully.

Eve wore a fresh dainty light-blue dress with trimming of embroidered violets at the throat and down the front; the best dress of her simple ward robe. Her head was bare. The blonde curls about her cheek were more than ever wayward as if something of her inner excitement had been communicated to them. The pale cheeks of her little face had become a rose-garden; starlight shone out of her eyes.

She had seen the hero of her secret musings intrepidly glance by death in the worst of its forms; and though woman's intuitive reticence would have kept her from admitting what she felt, her eyes cried the confessional.

McGuire with alert drowsiness saw it all; and he was troubled, as men are always troubled by inescapable beauty which it were robbery to touch. She had him sit down; and seated near by, she talked to him with a hundred questions. Had he not been dreadfully frightened? Yes, of course. But he lied; for there had been no time to be frightened with danger overtopping him so suddenly. It is doubtful if a man ever knows fright when he is once well into the thick of peril and fighting, but the easy and modest way is to talk of the great fear felt all the time.

Why on earth had he jumped into the water like that? Didn't he know the ocean was just full of sharks? Something grateful leaped up within him that Corydon had not told and that Gorvhalsen had forgotten, or had no occasion, to tell why. McGuire did not want to see the shock that would come to her eyes when she knew: it was more solicitude for her than the wish to appear better than he was; though no man is permitted by nature to wish to appear as he really is before the woman who admires him.

Her loveliness was as unescapable as her purity; either was something which if not unknown to him had long been remote. Childlike faith makes worthy hypocrites, sometimes. Men who may have no scruples against being evil are often not cruel; and often, too, they have become ennobled by trying to live up to the good thought of them. Her illusions about him, so frankly aglow in the light eyes, were a part of her beauty, like the cool blue gown with lace-like work of darker violets, like the warm cheeks and brightly blonde hair; and it would have been as cruel to destroy the illusions as to scar the cheek or tear the hair.

He did not think of all that. He felt it without thought; and felt other things that saddened, as when a man looks upon treasures that are his for the taking, but can not be taken without destroying the fragments of honor left in him. The lonely semi-outlawry of his outcast existence had given him compensations: excitement and true friendships with dangerous men; but it is doubtful if there are such gains to be had out of the careless life as keep a man from a sense of irrecoverable loss when in the presence of a pure sweet woman.

McGuire had no self-pity and no sense of the tragic, though he was almost painfully moved by her presence and what it revealed to him.

He answered her questions with evasive lightness. She felt that he was modest as the bravest and best men always are, and he looked at her steadily and believed with all the honesty of his inner nature that she was a vision which would soon pass from before his eyes and be seen no more; even doubted by memory.

Presently she said that her brother had a headache, a terribly severe headache. She was sorry. He would so have enjoyed the evening. It was plain that in a sober, immature way she had a mothering worry over Corydon. To the eyes he was a weakling; but there was nothing weak about the way he had kept his distress to himself and not complained of Gorvhalsen's brutal bantering. One did not associate gallantry with the awkward boy, no matter what he did. Stubbornness was the word for his virtue, and he had a great deal of it.

“Robert talks of you all the time,” she said approvingly. “About an hour ago he came from Uncle David's room and he looked dreadfully ill. This afternoon was fearfully hard on him. We all thought you never—never—it was terrible! He said that he had such a headache that he was going to bed. Uncle David tells him that men do not have headaches. Sometimes I think Robert is afraid of Uncle David. I've scolded him, but it does no good. There are times when I almost don't like Uncle David myself—though I do love him. He is a wonderful man.”

McGuire affirmed that he was.

“But he does drink—whole bottles in an evening!”

She almost whispered it, confidentially; yet in some way not censuring him and conveying that he was so vastly different that it was perhaps really not bad for him to do such a thing. Gorvhalsen's huge body and bold personality were outside her judgments; besides, he was kind to her.

The thing to which she was leading, and really did condemn, came out at once, as she said in a watchful, eager, sympathetic manner:

“But he will want you—too!”

McGuire's amusement escaped to his face; but he was hurt below the surface of his manner by the irony of its being the thing he had come for—to drink whole bottles.

There were times—and this night was one of them—when he would give, pint for pint, his blood for gin.

But in all things he was misread by the girl, who interpreted him according to her own admiration and desires.

“I know what you think,” she said hurriedly. “But people just have to do what he wants. My aunt says there was never any other man like him in just that way. He is kind-hearted though, and wouldn't hurt anything.”

Gorvhalsen came out with long shambling strides, his voice loud and face welcoming. Merely being alive seemed of great enjoyment to him; but there was a brain a-top that body, and whoever has an educated brain has moods of depression and troubled thought. But his large towering crude body was filled with the animal energy of ten men. He looked much taller in the cabin than he had appeared on deck. He was a striking figure in the loose sun bleached linen with a great black beard overlaying half of his enormous breast. The roughly brushed black hair tumbled in waves about his head. One of his large hands fell in an idle caress on Eve's shoulder. The restless fingers played with the back of her neck. It was the hand with which a giant of ancient fable might have seized a princess for his castle.

“An', Jake,” said McGuire, “into his dungeon I went; an' right along after us that girl came. She chased a big fat book out of a chair and sat there—all the time. Books all over the place. An' potted flowers along the windows. That devil with flowers, Jake. It'd be as if you carried a prayer-book.

“An' right against one bulkhead—he'd knocked two staterooms into one—was a sort of cupboard, a big wide chest-like table with glass doors an all covered an' filled with bottles.

“'There you are—gin, ever'thing, he said to me an' threw a hand across the room. But he kept right on talkin'—I don't know what about. An' there I was, Jake—but”

As McGuire had stared at the enticing bottles, some tall and round, some square-sided, some squat and bulbous with long slender necks and filled with rich browns, crystal or crimson, his eyes wavered into a line with the girl's face.

An unpremeditated resolution came to her. She jumped up, questioning him oddly with the barely audible word, “Gin?”

But Gorvhalsen either saw or heard.

“Gin, Miss Hebe. Gin for him—half a bottle at a time. And don't remember your prejudice against the breath of the gods when you fill my glass to-night. McGuire,” he said with tone and eyes disclosing strong affection for the dainty flower-like girl, “she makes her service the excuse for lecturing me on temperance.”

He laughed. Eve laughed shyly too, with her face timidly toward McGuire.

Gorvhalsen, momentarily deflected from his talk on sharks—he frankly gestured toward the book that Eve had tumbled from her chair to indicate the freshness of his learning—whipped back to the theme and went on. He thought that in former ages sharks must have been as big as whales; and he wondered why in the process of evolution size tended to diminish in the most formidable animals, strong and ferocious enough to resist attacks and, apparently, be the ones that would most surely preserve their species and even increase their size.

McGuire listened absent-mindedly, uninterested, but with an attentive manner that was entirely deceptive. He scarcely knew of what Gorvhalsen was talking.

Eve came to them from across the room with a little silver tray bearing two large glasses, one half filled with a brown smooth oily liquor, the other as full of pure crystal.

Gorvhalsen drank off the half-tumbler of brandy carelessly, hardly pausing in his talk.

McGuire's fingers closed on the other glass. He knew the girl's eyes were fast on him; but he would not look at her. He felt himself being tested and knew the expression that would be in her eyes if she expected him to resist. His ears did so strongly expect her whispered protest that he hesitated a moment, listening for it. She was, he felt, hoping to have him shake his head; but he did not—he could not.

He lifted the glass from the tray. He raised it to his lips—

“An', Jake, I nearly choked before I could top all that blasted water goin' down my throat. 'Too strong for you, eh?' says that black devil, grinning at me. He'd downed a half-pint o' brandy at a gulp. 'I'm not used to it,' I told him. An he could see it was the truth.

“An', Jake, it wasn't a joke with her. She didn't think I wanted the stuff—an' what could I do?”

Brundage chuckled grimly.

There were many things that he could have done; but her eyes looked at him with dazzling eagerness, expecting approval—and she read it in his half amused and part silly smile. For her there was intoxication in the secret between them, in the joy of circumventing that irresistible uncle. McGuire felt like a thirsty man who wakes from a dream of a cool bubbling spring under his lips; but he choked down all the water in the glass. She smiled joyfully, furtively at him, and was confirmed in the belief that she had saved him from a disagreeable experience.

Gorvhalsen never paused in his tramping and turning about the room. He talked continually with an aggressive manner, hesitating at times demand agreement with some statement or other and getting it; though McGuire, for his life, could not have told what he was affirming. He had his own thoughts, lots of them.

Gorvhalsen now and then gestured toward the buffet; and Eve, alert for the cue, would go quickly from her chair.

McGuire readily tired of pouring half-tumblers of water into himself; but Gorvhalsen said: “Drink!”

There was in that command, if not a threat, at least the hint of almost brutal unpleasantness; and he was a little watchful to note the liquor's effect on McGuire. But later when he said, “By the Lord's beard, you carry it well,” his approval was ungrudging.

A feverish blush came under McGuire's dark burned skin. Eve, shading her eyes from a lamp's glare, smiled beneath her two hands. She was very excited.

The noise of the near riot on deck came down-to them through the raised skylights.

“Stay here,” said Gorvhalsen, hurrying out, ever eager to be near trouble.

McGuire started to follow, but Eve laid a hand on his arm.

“Uncle David once frightened a young man until he drank water with a dash of camphor in it. He thought it was liquor and it made him stagger—Uncle David had told him it was gin. I just happened to remember and thought”

She broke off, laughing shyly. McGuire smiled. She was wholly reassured.

There was bustling and shouting. Two shots were fired.

McGuire sprang to the door.

“Don't—don't go!” she cried with hands protestingly blocking the door. Then, “Wait—I am afraid.” Perhaps she was; but the statement was the old, old plea to detain the man.

“Of what?” asked McGuire, listening for some thing besides her answer.

“Of those men—their faces. You can do nothing.”

“No—” listening. Quiet had followed. “No. But I could see what the others are doing.”

“You won't go?”

He did not promise, but he did not go. They listened. The forecastle storm was over. Gorvhalsen came back and laughed contemptuously.

“Tried to kill the Chinamen. Don't blame them. But they won't fight, McGuire. A poor breed, those men out there. Insult the officers from the dark. Why don't they come up and fight? In this world a man has the right to take what he wants; and I despise cowards.”

They had a supper in Gorvhalsen's room.

“Thought I was a gentleman—in bare feet,” said McGuire to Brundage.

Mrs. Gorvhalsen came, quiet, pleasant; and Jeanne, freshly vivid and bold. Corydon's headache or feeling of injury toward McGuire kept him out of sight; but no one seemed to miss him.

Gorvhalsen must have despised him, too, as a poor breed of man.

Beyond treating Jeanne with a casual, family-like courtesy, no one of them appeared to notice her, though McGuire felt that she was unavoidable and embarrassing. Her boldly staring eyes made him keep his face from her. She sang with Gorvhalsen at the piano.

“She has been a singer,” Eve whispered. “On the stage.”

Perhaps, he thought, it was having been on the stage that made them take her bold eyes and dress as something natural.

Mrs. Gorvhalsen often watched McGuire when he did not seem to be looking; but without approval or disapproval in her manner. She remembered him as the man who had taken Eve to the Hawaiian hills, of whom the consul had spoken with emphatic protest. Perhaps she knew, too, that Eve had never forgotten him.

When Jeanne left, it was without a word. She simply went out with a slight but apparent air of being offended. Gorvhalsen chuckled and looked with secret understanding, at his wife; then at McGuire, scrutinizing him with new interest. It was a rare man indeed who did not give all of his attention to Jeanne.

Mrs. Gorvhalsen soon after excused herself and on her way glanced at Eve; but Eve gazed back at her requestfully and remained in the room. Gradually Eve curled herself more and more snugly in the deep chair, and grew drowsy in spite of her wish to keep wide awake.

Gorvhalsen began to talk. He enjoyed talking, and stamped and turned about, his words running on and on. It was largely a matter of mood with him. One night he might have sent a distinguished guest out of his sight with some rude excuse. This night he treated a wastrel as a friend. On the morrow, likely, he would consider it an impertinence for McGuire to seem to remember the attention.

“Tell me,” he said abruptly, pausing with a touch of more than physical weariness in his manner, “what do you think life is for, anyway? Say what you please. She is asleep. There's a flower, McGuire,” and waving a hand at the stern windows he added, “I like flowers.”

He went on, forgetting his question:

“Jeanne—you can't help but notice Jeanne. Mrs. Gorvhalsen and I adopted her twenty years ago. A pretty pert little thing. Even then she knew she was beautiful. We couldn't keep her with us—paid other people to educate her. A bad job they made of it. McGuire, two men have blown their brains out on her door-step.” He said it with horrible casualness. “An Italian tenor tried to kill her—that's why she's on the Heraldr—to get away from him. She's cold as a piece of frozen meat”—McGuire shuddered—“but loves to have men mad over her. It's a disease. Beautiful, isn't she?” He asked it impersonally.

McGuire nodded and said, “Yes,” but was looking at Eve, who slept with cheek against folded hands.

“She'll be a real woman, McGuire—that girl. Worth a world of the other kind. But that white livered, prayer-maundering, knock-kneed Bobert—he's made an infidel of me; or would have if I hadn't been one already. If that's the way Heaven's favorites are rewarded, I prefer the devil's service. Eh? What do you say?”

McGuire said nothing. There was no need to speak. Gorvhalsen did not pause for an answer:

“Maybe he has his visions, though. Who can tell? But look at me—look at me—a big antediluvian brute. Does anybody expect me to get into the same suit of morals that fits that young pious fool with no more blood in his veins than's in a carrot? He's afraid of his own shadow. I hate a weak man—and a strong woman. I hate cripples, cowards, priests and sick people.

“You, McGuire, you're a crazy daredevil with out sense enough to be afraid of a shark, and—and”—he faced McGuire impulsively and almost snarled the words—“and I would rather have had the chance and the courage to come up through the water straight for that big man-eater than be the author of all the damned books to my name!”

He stopped. A glare of sincerity almost like fury was in his black eyes.

“Yes,” said McGuire, “but I'd rather 've written the books than have the nightmares that're comin' to me!”

Gorvhalsen reached out roughly and clapped his shoulder. The grip hurt. It seemed nearly to crush the shoulder.

“You are all right,” he said approvingly. “Let us have a drink and go on deck. It's getting late. We'll go and say something to excite Matt Ward.”

Gorvhalsen strode across the room and returned with a glass and bottle of gin, placing them in McGuire's hands; then turned to the buffet to pour himself a tumbler of raw brandy. The fumes of the open bottle came up to McGuire's face with the over powering thrill of fresh blood to a tiger. He trembled from fingers to knees.

Eve stirred slightly but did not awaken. Her feet were drawn up into the chair; the crisp dainty blue skirt was folded and crumpled under her and the small toes of two little slippers peeped out. She half-reclined, peacefully. The trace of a sweet contented smile stayed on her lips, so she must have had pleasant dreams about her.

McGuire's hands shook. Much of the liquor fell to the thick carpet as he poured, and filled the air with stronger odors; but too, as he poured he was looking at her. She slept, untroubled. He loved gin as the coward loves life. The glass came halfway to his lips and paused. Not within the memory of those who knew him had McGuire, wastrel, beach-comber, resisted an impulse; but then with slow dazed stiff walk like an unwilling man in a trance, holding his hands before him—one grasping the filled glass, one the bottle—he went across the room and fumblingly returned both to the table.

“Had enough, eh?” said Gorvhalsen, grinning.

“Yes—enough.”

He stumbled in turning around as he said it. Gorvhalsen laughed in soft chuckles.

“Go turn in, my boy. It is not every fellow that knows when to quit;” and he poured himself another deep drink.

“Turn in—yes,” McGuire mumbled and unsteadily made for the door, his hands outreaching, his head down.

“—An', Jake, Jake!”

McGuire's voice was tense, low, strained; its sincerity reached and disturbed the cold heart of Brundage as he heard the cry of a muffled voice:

“May God forgive—me!”

“What—why—why—” Brundage's hand touched him.

“Jake—I love her—her!”

McGuire laughed drunkenly, staggering as he moved.