And those who were there remembered afterwards that while Joshua stood his ground and laughed and clapped with the best of them, his brother Andrew left the house. They said his face was a sick white, and that he looked back at Mary for an instant from the doorway with a curious, hurt expression in his eyes, as if to say, "Is it only a game to you then? And if it's only a game, is it worth the candle?" They remembered it afterward, I say; long afterward. They thought he had gone out for just a moment; that presently he would return to hold up his end of the gay challenge over the cakes and cordial. But to that party Andrew Blake never returned. Their first hint of what was afoot they had when Rolldown Nickerson, the beachcomber, came running in, shining with the wet of the autumn gale that began that night. He wanted Joshua to look out for his brother. Being innocent of what had happened at the party, he thought Andrew had gone out of his head. "Here I come onto him in the lee of White's wharf putting a compass into the old man's sail-dory, and I says to him, 'What you up to, Andrew?' And he says with a kind of laugh, 'Oh, taking a little sail for other parts,' says he--like that. Now, just imagine, Josh, with this here weather coming on--all hell bu'sting loose to the north'rd!" * * * * * They say that there came a look into Joshua's eyes that none of them had ever seen before. He stood there for a moment, motionless and silent, and Rolldown, deceived by his attitude, was at him again. "You don't realize, man, or else you'd stop him!" "Oh, I'll _stop_ him!" It was hardly above a breath. "I'll _stop_ him!" And throwing his greatcoat over his shoulders, Joshua went out. You may believe that the house would not hold the party after that. Whispering, giggling, shivering, the young people trooped down Heman Street to the shore. And there, under the phantom light of a moon hidden by the drift of storm-clouds, they found Andrew gone and all they saw of Joshua was a shadow--a shadow in black frock-clothes--wading away from them over the half-covered flats, deeper and deeper, to where the Adams sloop rode at her moorings, a shade tailing in the wind. They called, but he did not answer, and before they could do anything he had the sail up, and he, too, was gone, into the black heart of the night. It is lonesome in the dark for a boy of six when the floor heaves and the bed shivers and over his head the shingles make a sound in the wind like the souls of all the lost men in the world. The hours from two till dawn that night I spent under the table in the kitchen, where Miah White and his brother Lem had come to talk with Duncan. And among the three of them, all they could say was "My heavens! My heavens!" I say till dawn; but our kitchen might have given on a city air-shaft for all the dawn we got.