“Who are you? What are you doing here?” asked Cap’n Smiley, sharply, though amazed mirth at the transformation of Mrs. Biggles caused his eyes to twinkle. The sailor stood quietly enough. His English was poor. He was, he said, one of the crew of the wrecked ship. He had been washed ashore unconscious on the night of the disaster but had recovered his senses before dawn, creeping into the sandhills. There he had hidden in bushes and slept. He had slept all day and at night he had prowled about. Breaking into one of the few summer cottages on the beach he had found a little food and on that he had subsisted. He hadn’t approached the Coast Guard Station nor made himself known to any one because of a fight in San Francisco in which he had killed a man. A boarding-house keeper had sheltered him and put him on the _Mermaid_, but the captain knew who he was and he had expected to be arrested when the ship made New York. The wreck had seemed to offer him a miraculous chance of escape, and he had somehow escaped with his life. Was he to survive in the face of such odds only to lose his life ashore? But now, half-starved and plainly feverish, he could struggle no longer; he would confess and take his chances. His eye remained with a fixed fascination on the food that lay on the table. He wriggled feebly in Cap’n Smiley’s hard grasp to reach it; then sank down limply with delirious mutterings. The keeper and Joe Sayre picked him up and carried him, as men on shipboard carry a lighter sail, to the station. Mrs. Biggles, entirely reassured, they left in her cabin. At the station a bed was made on the floor in the living room, not far from the stove. The keeper got out his medicine chest and prepared to spend a wakeful night. The man was evidently in a very bad state. Sedatives seemed to have no effect on him. He tossed about on the floor as if he felt a heaving deck under him. He talked almost continuously. His exchanges with the boarding-house keeper and with the skipper of the _Mermaid_ were on his lips; and interspersed with cringing entreaties were sentences that must have been uttered in a quarrel with the man he had killed. Cap’n Smiley listened patiently, but he could not make much of it.