As it came in on the line, hand over hand—seeming, in their imagination, to assist the operation horribly, by crawling up over the dank mud, the Captain and the little man bent forward together, to look at it; and started back, as one man, at the sight of the swollen, distorted features. For it was the body of Dandy Chater. Dandy Chater—born to such good and prosperous things—having his beginnings in such fair and unclouded circumstances—to have come to this at last! Well for him, surely, that the mother, at whose knee he had lisped his childish supplications to Heaven, was dead, before this thing fronted the world, and grinned back at it so horribly! To be found like this—muddy—soiled—broken—awful—dead—by two strangers, far away from the fair and pleasant places through which he had wandered in his innocent boyhood! The Captain—raising his head from the contemplation of what he believed to be the features of his dead friend Philip Crowdy—was confronted by the startled eyes of the little man with the faded whiskers. For a long minute, they stared at each other in silence; the thoughts of each were busy—for each had something to hide. For his part, Captain Peter Quist—whatever his personal grief may have been—bore in remembrance certain words impressed strongly upon him by the supposed Philip Crowdy; an injunction laid upon him not to reveal who he was, or that he was living under another name. The Captain—good honest fellow that he was—had a very sincere regard for his friend; and, believing that he had, in a moment of indiscretion, got mixed up with some queer people, was glad to feel that he could bury the knowledge of it in his own breast, as surely as the dead man would be buried in his grave. Sorrowing for him as he did, and bitterly vengeful as he felt, in his heart, at the mere suspicion that there had been foul play, he yet had the philosophic feeling that it did not matter now, as the man was dead; and the gentle thought that it would be a vile thing to defame one no longer able to defend himself. The little man—who was, of course, no other than the Dr. Cripps of “The Three Watermen”—had equally strong reasons for preserving silence. With that scene in the upper room of the little public-house still clearly before his mental vision, he saw, in this tragedy, the vengeance of some member or members of the gang—a vengeance prompted by fear that Dandy Chater had betrayed them. Being himself remarkably closely connected with that gang, he saw his own head in peril, if any stir were raised about this business. Therefore, it will be seen that the two men had equally strong reasons for saying nothing about the identity of the man who lay dead between them. The Captain, however, being, in his sober moments, a cautious man, looked attentively at the other, and said slowly—“Bad business—this ’ere. Do you ’appen to know the gent?” “No—never saw him in my life. How the devil should I?” stammered Cripps, with his teeth chattering.