The news set me packing. I announced to Dirk that I was off to Sunset Towers to seek the Captain, for I knew where he must have gone, and I dreaded what might have happened to him. Dirk offered to take me on the brig, but I asked him merely to sail to the Rancey and await me there. Somehow I felt I must make the journey alone. The thought of company was like the rubbing of rough garments on an open wound for I seemed to be embarked on a pilgrimage of atonement. I determined to find the Captain, and mad or sane I would beg his forgiveness, and close for ever the terrible account of blood that lay between us. Full of this resolve I travelled slowly northwards. On the way I repeated the whole story to myself, having all the clues in my hands now, even the mystery of my father's little fortune, which had evidently been hush money paid by the Captain to turn him from his quest. I felt chastened and subdued, unable to fix the blame. My father had certainly not offended to the penalty of death; and on the other hand the Captain, whipped to a madness at the memory of the crime he had been forced into, so much against his kindly nature as I knew, wasn't to be charged to the full with the blood he had shed to cover his traces. "Blood breeds blood," he had said. There was a fatality in the affair. My sympathy went out to him, for my father's stories had so stimulated my imagination that I could put myself in the Captain's place. Goaded as he had been I knew I should have acted as he had done. Nor could I reproach Abou for his mistaken devotion to an evil duty. Indeed something like admiration for him welled up in my heart when I thought how he had put aside his calm serenity of mind to dog his master's enemy year after year with the knife of murder in his hand, when his whole nature I believed craved for quietness and peace. And what a pursuit it had been! I had only glimpsed it by fleeting scenes, when those two superb trackers, the hunter and the hunted, had emerged for a moment into the daylight from their dark and tortuous burrowings underground. But the course of that tremendous chase, the shifts and wiles and dodges of that pair of consummate actors, had been a drama for the gods above, and none but they could tell its story. And so as I thought of these things I felt as I had so often felt before that I was moving in the presence of something more than human. The strange hatred, the madness, the bewildering unreason of the combat between those men who had no cause to wrong each other turned my mind back to the old tale of the curse. I yielded to the superstition, otherwise there was no accounting for the feud: it was that ancient malediction that had exacted such a penalty of blood.