We went to sea before he was sentenced; I as first mate, and Mabel as my promised wife. And, though the rest of the crew had deserted the murder ship, Tom went with us; for he wanted, he said, to get as far away from his brother, dead or alive, as was possible. And with his brother in limbo Tom was really a changed character, lively, anxious to please, and ambitious to learn. He seemed grateful to me, and accorded me his confidence, showing me his sheath knife one day with its point broken off. "For I want no murder in mine, sir!" he said. "I know I've got a bad temper, and I know these knives can go deep. No hangman's knots for me, Mr. Rogers! Say, sir, will you show me how to make one?" Not without repugnance did I make the grisly exhibit for him in the end of a rope. He practiced it until proficient, and then, gleefully and grinning, made hangman's nooses in ropes' ends until the men, with the suasion of the forecastle, changed his mood. The change seemed permanent. His unpleasant grin gave way to the old and equally unpleasant scowl and nervous manner. He grew irritable, and one morning was so offensively familiar with Mabel and so insolent to Captain Merwin and myself that I ordered him aloft in his watch below for punishment, giving him as a task the making up of gaskets on the mizzen. Then I paid him no attention until four bells, when the helmsman, looking aloft as he struck the bell, sang out, "Great God, sir! Look!" Tom, neatly noosed with a hangman's knot under his ear, was swaying at the end of an upper mizzentopsail yard gasket which depended from the place on the yard where his brother had clung the night of the murder. I had begun to dread the sound of "four bells." This division of the watch is at two, six, and ten o'clock, night or day. At six in the evening I had threatened the life of the mate; at ten in the evening he had been killed; and at ten in the morning Tom had hanged himself. What fatal or momentous event was to happen some day or night at two o'clock, I could not imagine; but an incident that occurred near the end of the homeward run led me to hope that the account had been settled. We were holystoning the decks, and a man working his stone near the wheel one afternoon found an obstruction in the deck, which he pried out and handed to me. It was a small, flat, triangular piece of steel, sharpened on one edge, the end of a sheath-knife blade. It had been driven or pressed into the deck by some powerful force, then broken off, exactly as though used as a brace between a spoke and the deck to hold the wheel steady while the helmsman left it for a moment or two. As I came to this conclusion the man at the wheel struck four bells, and I tossed it overboard. I said nothing about it to the captain or to Mabel; but news from Sydney that had beaten us by steamer to New York could not be concealed. On that day, at ten in the morning, Sydney time, his brother Bill had been hanged in the jail yard.