Captain O’Shea was very differently affected. He had not forsaken the quest of adventure. His soul was not content with cabbages and cows. The world beyond the horizon was always calling in his ears. As children are fond of fairy-stories, so his fancy was lured by the bizarre, the unexpected, the unknown. Your true adventurer is, after all, only a boy who has never grown up. His desires are wholly unreasonable and he sets a scandalous example. If you had asked him the question, this rattle-headed shipmaster would have frankly answered that nothing could give him more enjoyment than to sail for China and try to discover how and why the brand had been put on Maguire. Besides, he had an Irishman’s habit of taking over another man’s quarrel. “Poor Bill cannot square it himself,” reflected O’Shea. “’Tis the duty of some one to undertake it for him. It makes an honest man’s blood boil to think of the black wickedness that was done to him. As long as the heathen are contented to murder one another ’tis no business of mine. But an American sailorman--and maybe he is not the only one.” When he went downstairs in the morning, Johnny Kent was in the barricaded kitchen and Maguire paced the porch with the air of a man physically refreshed. He paid no heed to O’Shea, who was amazed to discover that he was talking to himself. The sounds he made were no longer inarticulate, but words and fragments of sentences curiously jumbled. In the stress of great excitement he had previously spoken with brief coherence, only to lapse into dumbness. Now, however, with no sudden stimulus to flash a ray of light into his darkened mind, he was beginning to find himself, to grope for expression like a child painfully and clumsily learning to read. To the listening O’Shea it sounded like heaping phrases together in a basket and fishing them out at random. The sailor’s voice had lost much of its harshness. Its tones were rather deep and pleasant. Swinging his long arms as he walked, he kept repeating such disjointed ideas as these: “_Heave her short--eleven dollars Mex--no, Paddy Blake--a big wax doll--all clear forward, sir--stinking river--roll the dice--the painted joss--a year from home--way enough--Wang Li Fu--die like rats--sampan, ahoy--no more drinks--good-by, Mary dear--in the paint locker--the head-devil--fish and potatoes._” It made O’Shea feel dizzy to listen to this interminable nonsense, but he followed it most attentively, and stole behind a lilac-bush lest Maguire should spy him and be diverted from his mad soliloquy. For some time there was no catching hold of a clew, but at length the shrewd shipmaster began to sift out certain phrases which were emphasized by reiteration. They were, in a way, the _motif_ of the jargon, hinting of impressions most clearly stamped on the man’s mind.