"'Nobody but God can be sure,' said he, and sat musing. 'Well, I take the responsibility God has seen fit to lay on me of a sudden. You won't hear me speak of this again: but you're an educated man, and you've nerve as well as brains--I marked ye by the head of the ladder, when the first boat was getting out. I reckoned you for one that doesn't speak out of his turn; and it came over me, just now, that I'd like one such man, and him a gentleman, to bear in mind that if I set my face pretty hard in the time that's ahead of us, it won't mean that I ain't feeling things at the back of it.' "'Thank you, Captain Macnaughten,' said I, pretty earnestly. 'The best I can answer is the simplest--that you're doing me much honour.' "'That's all right,' he said lightly: 'all right and understood. One man often helps another in funny little ways in this funny old world.' After a pause he went on yet more lightly and cheerfully, 'Well--and I've noticed you've a trick of beginning your sentences on that word 'well': it's a habit of mine too, they tell me--as the ladies say ashore, we're going to be worse before we are better, so we'll call those fellows aft a bit and ease the steering. . . . Stay a minute, though, before I call to them. . . . A clever man like you ought to be able to pick up a bit of navigation in a few lessons. While our boats keep together (as, please God, they will to the end) it wouldn't be a bad notion if you dropped alongside just before midday for a morning call, and I'll learn you how to handle a sextant and prick down a reckoning. . . . It'll be sociable, too. . . . Yes, I'll signal the time to you: but, to be ready for it, you might set your watch by my chronometer here. . . . I wonder, now,' he inquired oddly, 'if you've forgot to wind yours up to-night?' "Well, Roddy, it's the truth that I had forgotten. I looked at him, pretty foolish, and with that we both laughed--yes, there and then, a sort of laugh, low and quiet, like well-water bubbling. "'Now I'll tell _you_,' said the skipper, 'I caught myself winding up mine the moment after the ship went down . . . that's funny, eh? Five minutes to nine was the hour. . . . I'd hooked the old timepiece out of my fob, and there I was, winding, for all the world as if ashore and going to bed. . . . See here--three turns of the winch and she's chock-a-block again, if you ever! . . . And, come to think, I may as well correct _her_ by the chronometer, too.' "So we solemnly set our watches together, there by the binnacle light. A queer fancy took me that the act was a sort of ritual, not devised by either of us--a setting and sealing of friendship. . . . Ought a fellow, Roddy, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, to complain while he has these three stand-by's--a woman to love, a man to admire, and a man to hate?"