He did not answer at once. He looked at the picture with eyes that almost bulged, muttering to himself: "Pango Sam, Wong Fing, Landy Jim." Then he turned to me, and said excitedly: "Were you on board that bark?" I wondered if he had gone crazy, and did not answer. "No," he said. "It happened before you were born. What manner of man are you--to see into the past? It is not prophecy. Wait!" He darted out of my studio and into his own, where I heard him throwing things about, opening trunks and closets, and talking to himself. I relighted my pipe, seated myself, and waited, wondering what had upset him. After a time he returned, much calmer, and holding in one hand a painting, in the other a small tintype, the faces of which he concealed from me. "Our finite minds," he said, as he stood above me, "consider only what appeals to the five senses. Our subconscious minds consider the infinite, in which there is neither time, nor space, nor distance. That mutiny and murder has occurred, is occurring, and will occur. You have dipped into the infinite, that is all. Look!" He showed me the painting. It was dusty and dingy, but, with a few minor exceptions of detail, the exact duplicate of the painting on my easel! "I painted this thirty years ago," he said, "and for twenty-five years it has lain at the bottom of an old trunk. The subject was too grisly for the market, and I did not try to sell it." While I stared, open-eyed and open-mouthed, at his picture, and my pipe went out from my irregular, gasping breathing, he held before me the tintype. It was the picture of a young man clad in cheap, ready-made garments--the "store clothes" of the farmer, or the "shore clothes" of the sailor. And the face was the face that I had conceived for the man held aloft by the negro in my painting! "I was that young fellow," he said, "and this tintype was taken at the end of that voyage." "What does it mean?" I gasped. "Have I read your mind?" "I do not know. It depends upon what else you know yourself. Can you tell me what killed those men? Can you tell me what killed the nigger, so that instead of being thrown twenty feet I merely slid down from his grip and bumped my elbow on the ice? Ice, understand, near the equator, in the Indian Ocean." "I do not know," I choked. "Did this happen? When did it happen?" "Nearly fifty years ago, when I was 'fore the mast, unable to understand. But it was one of the influences that led me to the study of science. Perhaps I could understand now, if I had the data. But I cannot remember, and I have not your power of intuition. It is a wonderful power, but as likely to harm as to help you. Have you studied physics at all?" "Only in the most elementary way," I answered. "And something killed those men, you say--something you do not understand?"