With his craft at his fingers' ends, Luke had that instinct of navigation by which some men seem to find their way upon the trackless waters. There are sailors who are no navigators just as there are hunting men who cannot ride. There are navigators who will steer you from London to Petersburg without taking a sight, from the Thames to the Suez Canal without looking at their sextant. Such a sailor as this was Luke FitzHenry. Perfectly trained, he assimilated each item of experience with an insatiable greed for knowledge--and it was all maritime knowledge. He was a sailor and nothing else. But it is already something--as they say in France--to be a good sailor. Luke FitzHenry was a man of middle height, sturdy, with broad shoulders and a slow step. His clean-shaven face was a long oval, with pessimistic, brooding eyes--eyes that saw everything except the small modicum of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face--a face that might easily degenerate to the coarseness of passion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke's lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by passionate effort, but by consistent, cool resolve. Those who worked with him feared him, and in so doing learnt the habit of his ways. The steersman, with one eye on the binnacle, knew always where to find him with the other; for Luke hardly moved during his entire watch on deck. He took his station at the starboard end of the narrow bridge when he came on duty, and from that spot he rarely moved. These little things betray a man, if one only has the patience to piece them together. Those who go down to the sea in ships, and even those who take their pleasure on the great water, know the relative merits of the man who goes to his post and stays there, and of him who is all over the ship and restless. Luke was standing now like a statue--black and gleaming amid the universal grey of the winter night, and his deep eyes, cat-like, pierced the surrounding gloom. Here was a man militant. A man who must needs be fighting something, and Fate, with unusual foresight, had placed him in a position to fight Nature. Luke FitzHenry rather revelled in a night such as this--the gloom, the horror, and the patent danger of it suited his morose, combative nature. He loved danger and difficulty with the subtle form of love which a fighting man experiences for a relentless foe.