The creature in the water seemed now engaged in taking off his clothes. I saw one bare arm, and then the other, appear. In his struggles he sometimes sank beneath the surface, but always he emerged, flourishing the knife and screaming his addled harangue. He even tried to escape the tug by diving and swimming underneath. I strolled for’ard, and arrived in time to see him hoisted in over the rail of the _Elsinore_. He was stark naked, covered with blood, and raving. He had cut and slashed himself in a score of places. From one wound in the wrist the blood spurted with each beat of the pulse. He was a loathsome, non-human thing. I have seen a scared orang in a zoo, and for all the world this bestial-faced, mowing, gibbering thing reminded me of the orang. The sailors surrounded him, laying hands on him, withstraining him, the while they guffawed and cheered. Right and left the two mates shoved them away, and dragged the lunatic down the deck and into a room in the ’midship house. I could not help marking the strength of Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire. I had heard of the superhuman strength of madmen, but this particular madman was as a wisp of straw in their hands. Once into the bunk, Mr. Pike held down the struggling fool easily with one hand while he dispatched the second mate for marlin with which to tie the fellow’s arms. “Bughouse,” Mr. Pike grinned at me. “I’ve seen some bughouse crews in my time, but this one’s the limit.” “What are you going to do?” I asked. “The man will bleed to death.” “And good riddance,” he answered promptly. “We’ll have our hands full of him until we can lose him somehow. When he gets easy I’ll sew him up, that’s all, if I have to ease him with a clout of the jaw.” I glanced at the mate’s huge paw and appreciated its anæsthetic qualities. Out on deck again, I saw Captain West on the poop, hands still in pockets, quite uninterested, gazing at a blue break in the sky to the north-east. More than the mates and the maniac, more than the drunken callousness of the men, did this quiet figure, hands in pockets, impress upon me that I was in a different world from any I had known. Wada broke in upon my thoughts by telling me he had been sent to say that Miss West was serving tea in the cabin. CHAPTER IV.