Yet when all was said and done, it was more merciful to set him adrift than to bring him home to trial. Though he must suffer, he would suffer alone. The punishment that he so fully deserved would not be made more bitter by his knowing that all who knew him knew of his ruined life. "Poor Falk!" I thought, and was amazed at myself for thinking almost kindly of him. CHAPTER XXXII "SO ENDS" Through the watches that followed I passed as if everything were unreal; they were like a succession of nightmares, and to this day they are no more than shadows on my memory. Working in silence, the men laid the dead on clean canvas and washed down the decks; cut away wreckage, cleared the running rigging, and replaced with new sails those that had been cut or burned in battle. Then came the new day with its new duties; and a sad day it was for those of us who had stood together through so many hardships, when Neddie Benson went over the side with a prayer to speed him. We were homeward bound with all sail set, but things that actually had happened already seemed incredible, and concerning the future we could only speculate. We had gone a long way on our journey toward the Cape of Good Hope before our new carpenter had repaired the broken bulwark and the various other damages the ship had suffered, and before the rigging was thoroughly restored. Weeks passed, their monotony broken only by the sight of an occasional sail; days piled on end, morning and night, night and morning, until weeks had become months. In the fullness of time we rounded Good Hope, and now swiftly with fair winds, now slowly with foul, we worked up to the equator, then home across the North Atlantic. On the afternoon of a bright day in the fall, more than a year after we first had set sail, we passed Baker Island and stood up Salem Harbor. Bleak and bare though they were, the rough, rocky shores were home. To those of us who hailed from Salem, every roof and tree gave welcome after an absence of eighteen months. Already, we knew, reports of our approach would have spread far and wide. Probably a dozen good old captains, sweeping the sea, each with his glass on his "captain's walk," had sighted our topsails while we were hull down and had cried out that Joseph Whidden was home again. Such was the penetration of seafaring men in those good old days when they recognized a ship and its master while as yet they could spy nothing more than topgallantsails. We could see the people gathering along the shore and lining the wharf and calling and cheering and waving hands. We thought of our comrades whom we had left in far seas; we longed and feared to ask a thousand questions about those at home, of whom we had thought so tenderly and so often. Already boats were putting out to greet us; and now, in the foremost of them, one of the younger Websters stood up. "Mr. Hamlin, ahoy!" he called, seeing Roger on the quarter-deck. "Where is Captain Whidden?"