"Don't you remember Sultan, Mr. Hibbs? Why, the child I was would never forgive your forgetting Sultan. He died, very fat and ancient, soon after we moved to Dorchester. It was the sea air, my mother said. I wept like a fountain. But I think it was some while before then that I had ceased to feel like a child." _Chapter Three_ The island fell away in the west. All day long, and for three days more, the ketch _Diana_ held the northeast trade off her larboard bow, close-hauled. Ben supposed that presently Shawn would turn south and prepare for another chicken-thief raid somewhere in the Leeward Islands. On the fifth day he did shift course, but not much, the unchanging wind now on the larboard beam, the _Diana's_ direction southeast. A withdrawn, taciturn mood had come over Captain Shawn. The members of his ragamuffin crew, including Ben, felt it as schoolboys feel a teacher's cold in the head. For Ben there was the growing urgency of that secret whisper: _Something I can do...._ Ben was forced to admit that, whatever else might have happened to the year, he had learned a little seamanship. He had acquired sea-legs even before the capture of _Artemis_. He was never seasick--Shawn himself knew green moments from time to time. Ben had learned the ropes--no mystery after all but quite simple once you agreed to use your head and accept the buckle end of Marsh's belt as a parallel to the sarcasm of Gideon Hibbs. Marsh was acidly fair about that: as soon as Ben's hand had learned to jump for the right rope at the right instant, the belt was no longer used. Shawn's instruction had followed a different idiom--articulate explanation, with continuing patience (not displayed toward anyone but Ben). Somehow the Irishman conveyed: Let's forget that we seem to be enemies; let's consider this logic of navigation, the sextant, the tiller, the handling of sail, powers of wind and current and the pattern of the clear stars; let's do this as though we were not afraid to turn our backs to each other, you with the knife I let you keep, and I with mine. Ben could respond to this; could not help responding. The secret whisper continued in the dark.