It was touching to see the solicitude of the men and the clumsy kindness of their efforts to help poor Bill when the captain and the mate had left him. They crowded up to his bunk and smoothed out his blankets and spoke to him more gently than I should have believed possible. So angry were they at the brutality of the two officers, that the coldest and hardest of them all gave the sick man a muttered word of sympathy or an awkward helping hand. We worked over him, easing him as best we could, while the bell struck the half hours and the hours; and for a while he seemed more comfortable. In a moment of sanity he looked up at me with a sad smile and said, "I wish, lad, I surely wish I could do something for _you_." But long before the watch was over he once more began to talk about the tiny wee girl at Newburyport--"Cute she is as they make 'em," he reiterated weakly, "a-waiting for her dad to come home." And by and by he spoke of his wife, --"a good wife," he called her,--and then he made a little noise in his throat and lay for a long time without moving. "He's dead," the man from Boston said at last; there was no sound in the forecastle except the rattle of the swinging lantern and the chug-chug of waves. I was younger than the others and more sensitive, so I went on deck and leaned on the bulwark, looking at the ocean and seeing nothing. [Illustration] IV IN WHICH THE TIDE OF OUR FORTUNES EBBS [Illustration] CHAPTER XV MR. FALK TRIES TO COVER HIS TRACKS How long I leaned on the bulwark I do not know; I had no sense of passing time. But after a while some one told me that the captain wished to see me in the cabin, and I went aft with other tragic memories in mind. I had not entered the cabin since Captain Whidden died--"_shot f'om behine_." The negro's phrase now flashed upon my memory and rang over and over again in my ears. The cabin itself was much as it had been that other day: I suppose no article of its furnishings had been changed. But when I saw Captain Falk in the place of Captain Whidden and Kipping in the place of Mr. Thomas, I felt sick at heart. All that encouraged me was the sight of Roger Hamlin, and I suspected that he attended uninvited, for he came into the cabin from his stateroom at the same moment when I came down the companionway, and there was no twinkle now in his steady eyes. Captain Falk glanced at him sharply. "Well, sir?" he exclaimed testily. "I have decided to join you, sir," Roger said, and calmly seated himself. For a moment Falk hesitated, then, obviously unwilling, he assented with a grimace. "Lathrop," he said, turning to me, "you were present when Hayden died, and also you had helped care for him previously. Mr. Kipping has written a statement of the circumstances in the log and you are to sign it, Here's the place for your name. Here's a pen and ink. Be careful not to blot or smudge it."