In the pause I had long since learned so well I knew he was rolling a cigarette. Then I heard him cough, as he always did, when the cigarette was lighted and the first inhalation of smoke flushed his lungs. At twelve-fifteen, in the midst of Conrad’s delightful chapter, “The Weight of the Burden,” I heard Mr. Pike come along the hall. Stealing a glance over the top of my book, I saw him go by, sea-booted, oilskinned, sou’westered. It was his watch below, and his sleep was meagre in this perpetual bad weather, yet he was going on deck. I read and waited for an hour, but he did not return; and I knew that somewhere up above he was staring into the driving dark. I dressed fully, in all my heavy storm-gear, from sea-boots and sou’-wester to sheepskin under my oilskin coat. At the foot of the stairs I noted along the hall that Margaret’s light was burning. I peeped in—she keeps her door open for ventilation—and found her reading. “Merely not sleepy,” she assured me. Nor in the heart of me do I believe she had any apprehension. She does not know even now, I am confident, the Samurai’s blunder—if blunder it was. As she said, she was merely not sleepy, although there is no telling in what occult ways she may have received though not recognized Mr. Pike’s anxiety. At the head of the stairs, passing along the tiny hall to go out the lee door of the chart-house, I glanced into the chart-room. On the couch, lying on his back, his head uncomfortably high, I thought, slept Captain West. The room was warm from the ascending heat of the cabin, so that he lay unblanketed, fully dressed save for oilskins and boots. He breathed easily and steadily, and the lean, ascetic lines of his face seemed softened by the light of the low-turned lamp. And that one glance restored to me all my surety and faith in his wisdom, so that I laughed at myself for having left my warm bed for a freezing trip on deck. Under the weather cloth at the break of the poop I found Mr. Mellaire. He was wide awake, but under no strain. Evidently it had not entered his mind to consider, much less question, the manoeuvre of wearing ship the previous afternoon. “The gale is breaking,” he told me, waving his mittened hand at a starry segment of sky momentarily exposed by the thinning clouds. But where was Mr. Pike? Did the second mate know he was on deck? I proceeded to feel Mr. Mellaire out as we worked our way aft, along the mad poop toward the wheel. I talked about the difficulty of sleeping in stormy weather, stated the restlessness and semi-insomnia that the violent motion of the ship caused in me, and raised the query of how bad weather affected the officers. “I noticed Captain West, in the chart-room, as I came up, sleeping like a baby,” I concluded. We leaned in the lee of the chart-house and went no farther.