The wind was fresh outside. It was on their starboard quarter as they now made for the north. They saw the fire burning to leeward. It sent a long, red sinuous track of light across the black water that flowed between them and the land. Danny stood forward, never speaking, never spoken to, gazing fixedly at that sinuous track. To his affrighted senses it was as the serpent of guilt that kept trailing behind him. When they were well away, and the men had time to comprehend in its awful fulness what had occurred, they stood together aft and whispered. They had placed the body of the master by the hatchways, and again and again they turned their heads toward it in the darkness. It was as though the body might even yet stand up in their midst, and any man at any moment might find it face to face with him, eye to eye. The certainty that it was dead had not taken hold of all of them. It still bled, and one of the crew, Quilleash, an old man reputed to possess a charm to stop blood, knelt down beside Kisseck, and whispered in his ear. "A few good words can do no harm anyway," said Tear, and even Davy Cain was too much aghast to jeer at the superstition. "Sanguis mane in te, Sicut Christus se," whispered the old man in his native tongue into the deaf ear, and then followed a wild command to the blood to cease flowing in the name of the three godly men who came to Rome--Christ, Peter, and Paul. The blood stopped indeed. But "Chamarroo as clagh" ("As dead as a stone"), said the old man, looking up. Danny stood and looked on in silence. His spirit seemed to be gone, as though it could awake to life again only in another world. When death was certain the men began to mourn over Kisseck, and recount their memories concerning him. "Well, Bill's cruise is up, poor fellow; and a rael good skipper anyway." "Poor Bill! What's that it's sayin'?--'He who makes a ditch for another may fall into it himself.'" None spoke to Danny. A kind of awe fell on them in their dealings with the lad. They let him alone. It was as if he had been the instrument in greater hands. "He hadn't a lazy bone in him, hadn't Bill. Aw, well, God will be aisy on the poor chap." "You have to summer and winter a man before you know him. And leave it to me to know Kisseck. I've shared work, shared meat with him this many a year." "And a fine big chap, and as straight as the backbone of a herring. Aw, well, well, well." "Still, for sure, Bill made a man toe the mark. I'm thinking, poor chap, he's got summat to answer for anyway. Well, well, every man must go to the mill with his own sack."