Page:The Iron Pirate 1905.djvu/361

Rh "That's your way, and the right one," he answered; "but I'm not a man like that, and my heart's gone with my ship: we shall never see her like again."

"You built her?" I said questioningly.

"Yes," he responded. "I built her when I put my hand against the world, and, if it happened to me to go through it again, I'd do the same."

"What did you go through?" I asked, as he passed me the biscuits and the cup with liquor in it, and as he sat up in the raft I saw that the man had death written on his face.

But at that time he told me nothing in answer to my question; and sat for many hours motionless, his glassy eyes fixed upon the bottom of the boat. In the afternoon, however, he suddenly sat up, and took up his thread as if he had broken it but a minute before.

"I went through much," said he, gazing over the mirror-like surface of the trackless water-desert, "as boy and man. I lived a life which was hell; God knows it."

I did not press him to tell me more, for in truth I shivered so and was so numbed that even my curiosity to know of this life of crime and of mystery was not so paramount as to banish that other thought: Shall we live when the sun sinks this night? But he found relief in his talk, and, as the liquor warmed him, he continued faster than before—