“Get this into your head: the big liner was on a lee shore, no help in sight; she would have gone on the rock in an hour had it not been for the _Shearwater_. But twenty miles south she would have been safe. Tugs were coming to her assistance. It was that twenty miles Owen was trying to make.” “He was mad to try it,” I said. “No seaman with freight and passengers is justified in wrecking his own ship that way. And you tell me----” “The chief officer and the engineer came to me about it,” Gorham went on. “That was their idea--that Harry Owen was mad. The _Shearwater_ was being picked apart by the seas, as a boy pulls a toy to bits. In fact, when they finally appealed to me--after a deadly scene on the bridge--it looked very much as though we would be lucky to get to port ourselves without assistance. I recall that as we talked, down in the engineer’s cabin in full sight of the trampling engines, our voices were mournfully muffled. I was Harry Owen’s oldest friend, they told me, while the combers boomed and crashed overhead. It was my business to bring him to his senses.” “Did they really think he was mad?” I demanded. Gorham puffed at his pipe slowly. Then he rose and went to his portmanteau and fumbled around a little and came back with a bit of soiled, flimsy paper. “They had this,” he explained. “The wireless man had brought it to the chief and it put them all in a blue funk.” He spread the paper out on his great knee and read it thoughtfully. “Harry sent it as a message while we were making a fresh hitch for the hawser.” Gorham handed it to me with a gesture, as if to say: “You see what we were confronted with.” I read that little sheet, written in Harry Owen’s bold script. It was brief. Then I laid it on the table. “And what did Sheila have to say?” I asked. “She knew nothing about that message,” he responded. “Nor did she know much about what was going on. I went in to see her several times. She sat in a big chair fastened to the deck in Harry’s cabin and stared at me out of her cold, shallow eyes.” “Did nobody else go to her?” I inquired. “I’d have thought the chief officer--” “The chief officer had had enough in the wheelhouse,” Gorham replied. “He came out like a man in a daze; but he did his duty like a man. No idle hands on the _Shearwater_ that night!” “But what did they make out of that message?” I insisted. “You tell me they went to you as a final resort, to ask you to bring Harry Owen to his proper senses. What did they make out of that wireless he sent?” Gorham peered at me. “What would _you_ make out of it?” I thought this over. Now that the story was plain in my mind, I could easily interpret that short, strange message. But what would I have made of it, seated on a lounge in sight of swiftly moving engines, with the boom of a tempest roaring overhead and only this faintest of glimmers to light up the darkness in the soul of a man who was ruthlessly carrying me to destruction? I shook my head.