It was Desmond’s trick at the wheel between eight and midnight. Gulam Mahomed was on the look-out; the rest of the crew were forward squatting on the deck in a circle round Fuzl Khan. Desmond, thinking of other things, heard dully, as from a great distance, the drone of the Gujarati’s voice. He was talking more freely and continuously than was usual with him; ordinarily his manner was morose; he was a man of few words, and those not too carefully chosen. So prolonged was the monotonous murmur, however, that Desmond by and by found himself wondering what was the subject of his lengthy discourse; he even strained his ears to catch, if it might be, some fragments of it; but nothing came into distinctness out of the low-pitched drone. Occasionally it was broken by the voice of one of the others; now and again there was a brief interval of silence; then the Gujarati began again. Desmond’s thoughts were once more diverted to his own strange fate. Little more than a year before, he had been a boy, with no more experience than was to be gained within the narrow circuit of a country farm. What a gamut of adventure he had run through since then! He smiled as he thought that none of the folks at Market Drayton would recognize, in the muscular, strapping, sun-tanned seaman, the slim boy of Wilcote Grange. His imagination had woven many a chain of incident, and set him in many a strange place; but never had it presented a picture of himself in command of as mixed a crew as was ever thrown together, navigating unknown waters without chart or compass, a fugitive from the chains of an Eastern despot. His quick fancy was busy even now. He felt that it was not for nothing he had been brought into his present plight; and at the back of his mind was the belief, founded on his strong wish and hope, that the magnetism of Clive’s personality, which he had felt so strongly at Market Drayton, was still influencing his career. At midnight Fuzl Khan relieved him at the wheel, and he turned in. His sleep was troubled. It was a warm night--unusually warm for the time of year. There were swarms of cockroaches and rats on board; the cockroaches huge beasts, three times the size of those that overran the kitchen at home; the rats seeming as large as the rabbits he had been wont to shoot on the farm. They scurried about with their little restless noises, which usually would have had no power to break his sleep; but now they worried him. He scared them into silence for a moment by striking upon the floor; but the rustle and clipper-clapper immediately began again.