“You’d have had them all yet, but you amused yourself watching poor McArliss fall into the drink. You would have had it all--just the same this morning--for he would never have hit the reef on duty----” It was Bellair who spoke, and the thing had suddenly appeared very clear to him. Stackhouse did not falter from the present, his huge head darting east and west to stare through the whitening film. “It was my hamber. There is room here at my feet. It was little, yet meant so much. I should not have troubled you----” The lack of it seemed suddenly to hurt him even more poignantly. “You will all go to hell with your talk of beace,” he declared, looking between them but at no pair of eyes. “I will go first, what with the drink dying out, but you will not be long. There is hell for me, but for all alike. You may live days--but the longer, the more hell. And you will all come at last--to the long deep drink of the brine----” “Oh, come now, Stackhouse,” said Bellair. “It may not turn out so badly. You’ve had luck before. You’ve talked much to me of luck--and deaths of others. If it’s your turn--face it as your innumerable friends faced it.” The man was undone before them. The flesh of his jaws stood out, as if pulled by invisible fingers. His heavy lips rubbed together, so that they turned from the sight of them. “There was room in the boat for that basket of rum,” he called out insanely. “It was all to me. There is no talk of God for me--rum was all I had!... I would have been so quiet. It would have been here at my feet, but for that fool who talks of God, and can never know the thirst of men.” Fleury turned to him, his face deeply troubled. It occurred to Bellair that there was something to what Stackhouse said. Fleury, in kicking back the hamper, had kept the devil of Stackhouse from entering the boat, and Stackhouse served no other.... More and more it was twisting his brain, as young alligators twist at a carcass. “I would have had it here between my knees. And I would have had the little bottle from the cabin--the last that boots you to sleep----” “And so that is what you sent her back for--sent her to her death----” “You lie. She was held here--trying to get the hamber to me. There would have been time. She would have gone and come. She would have been here now----” Bellair and Fleury glanced at each other. “I am rotted with drink--and will drink the brine first, but you will follow me. You will bring it up with your hands and drink--and drink----”