According to orders they headed off for Newfoundland; but Plowman, who was still sick, must have left the managing of the ship largely to Quelch, his immediate subordinate. Everything went snappily as with leather throats and fisted hands Quelch and Holding hustled the men into quick, effective action. When they had been a week out from Boston it was easy to see that the captain was in a bad way. Probably at his command they put in at a way port to obtain medical help. The brig was anchored in the stream, and Quelch went ashore in the boat. Now among the riffraff aboard there was a handful--a small handful--of the more decent sort of seamen, of whom Pimer and Clifford were representatives. These two began to get anxious about the captain as the afternoon dragged on and no boat, Quelch or doctor returned from the shore. The sick man was groaning all the time and in apparent extremes. Nobody seemed to pay any heed to him; but all afternoon the crew roared and shouted and quarreled over their cards and dice, while aft by the cabin only Holding turned about and about on the deck, his hands behind his back, preoccupied with his thoughts. It began to strike Pimer and Clifford as odd, to say the least; so toward evening, as the August sun was turning red behind the hills, Pimer and Clifford went to the cabin to give a little human help. As they passed Holding, walking up and down the deck, he looked at them queerly but said nothing. Clearly, things were not just as they ought to be. In the twilight, startlingly, a rough tongue ordered them away from the cabin. A sentinel was there; Peter Roach stood guard at the captain’s door, armed with a drawn cutlass. Had the skipper directed this? Then they noticed that the cabin door was bolted from the outside with a marlin-spike thrust through the bolt socket, the bolt itself having long been lost. Obviously this was not the captain’s doing. Pimer and Clifford looked at each other as men do in peril. Something very evil was moving about them. At dark Quelch came back in the boat, and there was a whispering between him and Holding. The ship lights were hung out; and the lantern revealed something of the knobbly, stupid face of Peter Roach, still standing at his sinister watch. No one moved toward the ill-fortuned cabin. Peter Roach, the sentinel, could not be said to have been a peculiarly sensitive person. Some time later he was to die with as little feeling for himself as he had had for poor Plowman. He was an automaton. And so this crowd of men lay all about the hot decks, waiting for the captain to die. Those were hard hours for Clifford and Pimer and the one or two other loyal men. A little before midnight the cries of the sufferer ebbed away, and Peter Roach stolidly left his post and as stolidly grunted a few words at Holding. He and Quelch, taking a lantern, entered the cabin and found that nature had at last done their job for them: Captain Plowman was dead.