Then indeed I sat down on my pile of canvas and started to think. But with little result. I couldn't imagine what could have induced my captors to kidnap me in this way and take me out to sea. Indeed, I wondered now whether it was the officers after all who had caught me. Was there another on my track? My father's secret enemy, it might be. Perhaps now the persecution was to include me too. But who was that other one who had been hidden under the archway? What was his part in the drama? And then the memory of the paralysing fear I had felt told me it must have been the witch, Bite-in-the-Dark. I shuddered at the thought. Was it indeed she? I found no answer to all these questionings, but tossed them vainly about in my muddled mind till all was chaos and confusion. And after all, I told myself, it might be a mistake. I preferred to accept that solution, for it was the most consoling. And yet for the life of me I couldn't imagine any set of circumstances to account for such an error. So telling myself it was all a mistake which would soon be rectified, yet believing deep within me that the shadow of fear which had darkened my father's life was now closing about me too, I lay down and tried to sleep. But the morning brought no comfort. I discovered that I was in some part of the deck-house. I could hear the carpenter at work close by, and the smell of sizzling pork told me that the galley wasn't far distant. There were voices too, but in spite of my knocking and shouting no one took the least heed of me. I peered out through the window which gave on to a strip of deck, pressing my face to the pane, waiting for some one to pass by. But no one came, and I fell back to my pallet disheartened. Eventually a great rough fellow, the one I suspect who had growled at me outside the door, brought me a hunk of pork on a slab of bread and a tin of vile coffee. But to all my questioning he wouldn't answer a word except, "The skipper'll settle you all right; don't you fear." Later in the day I demanded to see the skipper, and was told that the longer it was before I saw him the healthier it would be for me. So I gazed through the little window growing more and more disconsolate, till even the swaying of the waves as they slid out from beneath the vessel and tossed their manes and curved away to the open waters failed to stir my ardour. The wonder became a grey monotony, which brought with it even an accustomed sickness; for as a rule I was a good sailor, and in other circumstances would have gloried in the swelling monsters which pushed up from under the vessel to drop her into a deep pool of overshadowing green. But now I felt strangely dizzy, and for a while lay rolling on the floor vomiting miserably; and it didn't seem to matter in the least whether the vessel and all within it should sink to the bottom of the sea.