“Seein’ as how we was makin’ nothing of it at all by the way we was doing, I climbs up on the poop-deck, thinking maybe to get a sight of my young gentleman through the sky-light. But no; he had blocked up the sky-light with mattresses from the captain’s berth. So then I went across the poop-deck to the stern falls. The boat had been shot away from the lee davit by our fire, and the lines hung loose from the falls over the stern. I lashed two on ‘em together and let myself down from the davits with one hand, holding my pistol with t’ other. I eased myself to one side until I was low enough, and then I peeped in at the stern window. There I could see my young gentleman off beyond in the captain’s cabin standing close by the door, and I can see him now as plain as I can see this here hand o’ mine. He had pulled a couple of sea chists to the door, and he had a plank from the captain’s berth set agin ‘em and propped agin the braces of the table. He was in his shirt sleeves, and he had a pistol in each hand. The captain o’ the ship was a’ talkin’ to him from t’ other side of the door, telling him he’d better gin up and surrender the money, and I could hear my young gentleman swearing by all that was holy that he would never gin up the money. He had his head turned to one side, and he didn’t see me, so I crawled in through the window. But I’d no more ‘n set foot on deck than all on a sudden he wheels around like a flash, and afore I knowed what he was at—Bang!—he fires his pistol fair for my head. I felt the wind of the ball and it smashed into a chiny closet just behind me. Then, seeing he had missed me, he ups with t’ other pistol and arter that ’twas either him or me. So I let fly, and down he went all of a heap acrost the chist afore the door.” “Was he dead?” asked Jack. “I think he were,” said Dred. “Leastways he was dead afore we could get him out of the cabin.” Dred told this story to Jack one afternoon as they were sitting together up under the lee-forecastle rail, and then he showed him the pardon in the oiskin bag hung around his neck. In the intimacy between the two Jack talked much to Dred about his own prospects, and his new friend advised him to submit to his fate with patience. “Arter all,” he said, “five year be n’t so werry long—not nigh as long as death. And then you’ll see a deal o’ the world, and arter that you goes back home agin, an’ there ye be,” and the illogical words brought a good deal of comfort to Jack. CHAPTER VIII TO THE END OF THE VOYAGE ON a long sea voyage you come to lose all sense of time. One day melts and blends into the other so that you can hardly tell them apart. They stretch along into weeks, and the weeks, perhaps, into months which can neither be called long nor short, but only just a monotonous reach of time.