"Then God help you, Harrigan, for you ain't the man I took you for." CHAPTER 20 He rose and left Harrigan to the dark, which now lay so thick over the sea that he could only dimly make out the black, wallowing length of the ship. After a time, he went into the dingy forecastle and stretched out on his bunk. Some of the sailors were already in bed, propping their heads up with brawny, tattooed arms while they smoked their pipes. For a time Harrigan pondered the mutiny, glancing at the stolid faces of the smokers and trying to picture them in action when they would steal through the night barefooted across the deck--some of them with bludgeons, others with knives, and all with a thirst for murder. Sleep began to overcome him, and he fought vainly against it. In a choppy sea the bows of a ship make the worst possible bed, for they toss up and down with sickening rapidity and jar quickly from side to side; but when a vessel is plowing through a long-running ground swell, the bows of the ship move with a sway more soothing than the swing of a hammock in a wind. Under these circumstances Harrigan was lulled to sleep. He woke at length with a consciousness, not of a light shining in his face, but of one that had just been flashed across his eyes. Then a guarded voice said: "He's dead to the world; he won't hear nothin'." Peering cautiously up from under the shelter of his eyelashes, he made out a bulky figure leaning above him. "Sure he's dead to the world," said a more distant voice. "After the day he must have put in with Campbell, he won't wake up till he's dragged out. I know!" "Lift his foot and let it drop," advised another. "If you can do that to a man without waking him, you know he's not going to be waked up by any talkin'." Harrigan's foot was immediately raised and dropped. He merely sighed as if in sleep, and continued to breathe heavily, regularly. After a moment he was conscious that the form above him had disappeared. Then very slowly he turned his head and raised his eyelids merely enough to peer through the lashes. The sailors sat cross-legged in a loose circle on the floor of the forecastle. At the four corners of the group sat four significant figures. They were like the posts of the prize ring supporting the rope; that is to say, the less important sailors who sat between them. Each of the four was a man of mark.