Shawn's struggle with the spyglass was not prolonged. Something--possibly sweat on his hands--caused the glass to slip and fall to the deck with a sharp tinkle of breakage. Ben thought: _Something broke in me then, and when he dies something in me will die and no help for it._ He would have retrieved the glass for Shawn, but Shawn stooped quickly, blood suffusing his face, and leaned at the rail fumbling at it aimlessly, though he must have known when a shard of broken glass fell from his fingers that the thing was smashed beyond saving. "And didn't I know last night that I must meet them in a calm? And alone. I was not told I would be blind also." "Mr. Shawn----" "Blind!" Shawn said, and hurled the spyglass far out over the flat water, toward the black blade that calmly cruised in its wide circuit of the motionless _Diana_. "Mr. Shawn, Peter Jenks would speak for me, if I may enter the cabin. Merely the sight of me would make him speak. Does he know I am aboard?" "What? He knows it. I told him long ago you were one of us." "Then you told him a lie, for I have never been one of your crew and well you know it." "But you will be," said Shawn, not commandingly but in pleading, almost in pathos, and took hold of Ben's arm. "You will be." Ben met the blue stare, knowing how in many ways it was truly blind, and shook his head. "I can make Jenks speak, Mr. Shawn. You wish him to speak, do you not?" "What? Why, he must, if only to confess the sin. It's a very great sin to steal a man's dream. I'd compel no man to die in it." "What if he never did so, Mr. Shawn?" Shawn let go his arm. "You question the voice that guides me?" "Did your voice tell you of the coming of that sloop?" "I am not God. I am not told everything." "A sloop bearing Jan Dyckman's name, a sloop that seems now to be moving, Mr. Shawn, in a flat calm where we find no breath of wind at all? But we might be moving presently. Will you look over there--sir?" Shawn swung about to gaze where Ben pointed, to the northeast. There--no illusion--a faint blackish smudge was visible on the horizon, with a slight hazing in a small area of the burning sky. Shawn turned back to Ben a face transfigured. "Why, there's the answer! Let it come down on us, and we'll outrun them to the ends of the earth. Can you doubt me now? What's that you were asking? Oh, Jenks, Jenks. You may not go in the cabin, Ben, not yet. But sure he'll speak now, and I seeing to it. A word of that sloop and he'll speak, the Devil willing, if I must cut out his damned tongue and let it wag alone." Shawn strode down the quarterdeck laughing--not in music but with shrillness, high and thin, almost an old man's laugh. "Let it come down! D'you hear, Ben? D'you hear?--I say, if that squall comes down on us, Mother of God, we'll not reef one inch of sail, I'll hang the man that tries it. Let it come down, we'll go about and run south for Hell or Heaven, or the western sea, or the dark!"