"Oh, be quiet," said he, "and let _me_ do the talking! I've had no one to talk to, these five months around the Horn, but a Norwegian skipper, a first mate of the same country, a fellow-passenger shipped off as a dipsomaniac for a cure (we lost him somewhere in the worst of it--I've an idea he let himself be swept overboard), and a mixed crew that I helped to cure of _beri-beri_ at St. Helena. So I want to do the talking, with your leave. "--And I want to say this first, foremost, once and for all. I am come _simply to tell you_. I understand the devil of a lot about hatred by this time--more than you will ever begin to guess. But you taught me, anyhow, this much about friendship, that I couldn't bear to go along with you without your knowing every atom of the truth. That means, we're going to be clean cuts, when I've done. . . . You'll loathe the tale. But, damn it, you shall respect me for this, that I cut clean, for old sake's sake, and wiped up the account, before we parted as strangers and I started life afresh." "All this is pretty mysterious, Jack," said I. "You know that, for all the hurt he'd done you, I shied out of helping your pursuit of Farrell. . . . Tell me, what happened to Farrell? Went down in the _Eurotas_, I guess, and so squared accounts. That's what you mean-- eh?--by your clean cut and starting life afresh? . . . If so, for your sake I'm glad of it." "He didn't go down in the _Eurotas_," Foe answered gravely: "As a matter of fact I dragged him on board one of the boats with my own hands." "What?" said I. "Farrell another survivor?" "Upon my word," he answered, lighting a cigarette, "I can't swear to Farrell's being alive or dead. Probably he's dead; but anyway I've no further use for him, and that's where the clean cut comes in. I had to quit hold of him because a woman beat me. . . . Now sit quiet and listen." FOE'S NARRATIVE. "Did you know that Farrell had married? . . . Yes, at San Ramon, a little portless place some way down the coast of Peru. The woman was a Peruvian and owned a banana-strip there, left to her by her first husband, a drunkard, in part-compensation for having ill-used and beaten her. "When I ran Farrell to earth there, after he'd given me the slip for twelve months and more, this woman had married him and almost made a new man of him. In another month or so I don't doubt she'd have converted him into man enough to tell her all the truth, and let her deliver him. "As it was, he passed me off for his friend--the ass! . . . I shipped with them, and we worked down the coast, by fruit-ship and sloop, to Valparaiso, intending for Sydney. . . . Now at this point I might easily make myself out a calculating villain. Farrell was enamoured to feebleness, and to make love to his Santa was an opportunity cast into my lap by the gods. . . . But actually, before I could even meditate this simple villainy, I had fallen in love with her because I couldn't help it.