The mask softened a little; a brittle thing quivering, but because it was so greatly needed it would not break. She caught her breath and said: "Oh, I am sorry! Forgive me too--if you can." She caught up her clothes in a clumsy armful and ran barefoot out of the room. She had forgotten her slippers. Ben knew--this was the worst knowledge of all--that he could not search for her in the empty house. If he found her somewhere, a hurt and shrinking brown slave, he would not be finding her at all. The slippers were very small, soft, gray, a little run over at the edges. Ben dressed clumsily. He took up one of the slippers and tucked it under his shirt, but then it seemed to him that he could not even do that. He put back the mute and harmless thing beside its companion, and left the house. As he unhitched Molly and set his foot in the stirrup it occurred to him, in a misery now grown dull and almost impersonal, that perhaps it takes more than a successful act of intercourse at seventeen, to make a man. * * * * * "I say overside is the only place. A devil's name, what do you want of a pisstail boy on such an errand?" "Watch that tongue, Judah. Watch it, man, against the day the rations'll run short and I'll be a-mind to cut it off and ram it down your gullet for amusement and nourishment, now that's no lie." "I said nothing, only spoke m' futtering mind." "Good. You may do it again. You may speak up plain and tell me who's captain of this bloody sloop." "You are, Mister Shawn. I'm only saying, a God-damn boy is no use here. Are you soft on the pup?" "You could say one thing too much one day." "Dead in hell or alive in hell with one eye, what's the difference? Comes to that, though, betwix' you and me, maybe I won't be the one that dies. Be you going below--sir?" "I am in a moment. You too." "Leaving only Joey and Manuel on deck, and Joey scared of a tiller he don't know yet, and the God-damn night blacker 'n a witch's box?" "What's to be scared of, you fool?" "I a'n't scared of nothing, never was. Piss on 'em all. What've I got left any man could take from me? You want Joey to pile up the tub on Noddle's Island it's no beshitten difference to me and you know it." "Noddle's is it? You're daft. We're miles south of it, and clear of Dorchester Neck too, and nothing to watch but a sweet wide-open sea. Steady as she goes, Joey Mills! Why, Judah, man, I can feel and smell the sea and the land in the dark, the way they lie." "I'll ever recall how Quelch give you a rope's end once for that same mad Irish brag. Nobody can feel land in the dark."