“Well, sir,” he began again, this time more coherently, “it’s just a little thing—foolish on my part, of course—a whim, so to say—but you will remember, near the beginning of the voyage, I showed you a scar on my head . . . a really small affair, sir, which I contracted in a misadventure. It amounts to a deformity, which it is my fancy to conceal. Not for worlds, sir, would I care to have Miss West, for instance, know that I carried such a deformity. A man is a man, sir—you understand—and you have not spoken of it to her?” “No,” I replied. “It just happens that I have not.” “Nor to anybody else?—to, say, Captain West?—or, say, Mr. Pike?” “No, I haven’t mentioned it to anybody,” I averred. He could not conceal the relief he experienced. The perturbation went out of his face and manner, and the ambushed thing drew back deeper into the recess of his skull. “The favour, sir, Mr. Pathurst, that I would prefer is that you will not mention that little matter to anybody. I suppose” (he smiled, and his voice was superlatively suave) “it is vanity on my part—you understand, I am sure.” I nodded, and made a restless movement with my book as evidence that I desired to resume my reading. “I can depend upon you for that, Mr. Pathurst?” His whole voice and manner had changed. It was practically a command, and I could almost see fangs, bared and menacing, sprouting in the jaws of that thing I fancied dwelt behind his eyes. “Certainly,” I answered coldly. “Thank you, sir—I thank you,” he said, and, without more ado, tiptoed from the room. Of course I did not read. How could I? Nor did I sleep. My mind ran on, and on, and not until the steward brought my coffee, shortly before five, did I sink into my first doze. One thing is very evident. Mr. Pike does not dream that the murderer of Captain Somers is on board the _Elsinore_. He has never glimpsed that prodigious fissure that clefts Mr. Mellaire’s, or, rather, Sidney Waltham’s, skull. And I, for one, shall never tell Mr. Pike. And I know, now, why from the very first I disliked the second mate. And I understand that live thing, that other thing, that lurks within and peers out through the eyes. I have recognized the same thing in the three gangsters for’ard. Like the second mate, they are prison birds. The restraint, the secrecy, and iron control of prison life has developed in all of them terrible other selves. Yes, and another thing is very evident. On board this ship, driving now through the South Atlantic for the winter passage of Cape Horn, are all the elements of sea tragedy and horror. We are freighted with human dynamite that is liable at any moment to blow our tiny floating world to fragments. CHAPTER XXV.