‘Oh, but it’s dreadful to think of that poor man having been drowned!’ exclaimed Miss Jennings. ‘I was watching the boat before the gun was fired. In an instant she vanished. She might have been a phantom. She melted out upon the water as a snow-flake would. I pressed my eyes, for I could not believe them at first.’ ‘Horrible!’ exclaimed Wilfrid in a hollow, melancholy voice; ‘what had that miserable creature done that we should take his life? Have we insensibly--insensibly--courted some curse of heaven upon this yacht? Who was the villain that did it?’ He wheeled round passionately: ‘Finn--Captain Finn, I say!’ he shouted. The captain, who was giving directions to some men in the waist, came aft. ‘Who was it that fired that shot, Finn?’ cried my cousin in his headlong way, jerking his head as it were at Finn with the question, whilst his arms and legs twitched and twisted as though to an electric current. ‘A man named O’Connor, Sir Wilfrid,’ responded Finn. ‘Did he do it expressly, think you?’ ‘I wouldn’t like to say that, your honour. The fellow’s a blunderhead. I inquired if there was e’er a man for’ard as could load and sight a cannon, and this chap stands up and says that he’d sarved for three years in a privateer and was reckoned the deadest shot out of a crew of ninety men.’ ‘Call him aft,’ said Wilfrid. ‘If he aimed at that boat intentionally it’s murder--call him aft!’ He took some impatient strides to and fro with a face that worked like a ship in a seaway with the conflict of emotions within him, whilst Finn going a little way forward, sung out for O’Connor. Meanwhile we were rapidly widening the distance between us and the brig. I protest it was with an honest feeling of relief that I watched her sliding into a toy-like shape, with promise of nothing showing presently but some radiant film of her topmost canvas in the silver azure that streaked by a hand’s breadth, as it looked, the whole girdle of the horizon; for one was never to know but that her people might send the red-capped man adrift for us to pick up, or worry us in some other way. Finn arrived, followed by the Irishman who had discharged the gun; his immense black whiskers stood out thick, straight, inflexible as the bristles of a chimney-sweep’s brush, contrasting very extraordinarily with the bright apple-red of his cheeks and the blue, Hibernian, seawardly eye that glimmered under a dense black thatch of brow. He stood bolt upright soldier-fashion, with his arms straight up and down by his side like pump-handles, and fixed an unwinking stare upon whoever addressed him. ‘You fired that gun, Captain Finn says,’ exclaimed Wilfrid. ‘Oi did, your honour.’ ‘What made you take aim at the boat?’ ‘Your honour, by the holy eleven, I took aim at the brig. There’s something wrong with the pace.’ ‘Wrong with the piece. What d’ye mean?’