"With that knife. You'll use that knife against the man who would have given you the key to a whole new world." "Yes." "Were we not to go there together, Ben?" "Certainly I dreamed that once myself, before Jan Dyckman was found dying in a dirty alley. And afterwards too, until I learned why he had to lie there." "Did I not give you the vision?" "Yes." "And see it strike fire in you?" "Yes." "As I never saw it in any other.... Have I not been kind?" "Yes." "Forbearing too? Forgiving a thousand things I'd never take from any other man?" "Yes." "But you will use the knife. Have we not spoke together a thousand times like friends? Haven't I made you laugh?" "Yes." "But you will use it.... Why?" "Shawn, do you think I could walk into Heaven across the flesh of Jan Dyckman? Dyckman and others--how many? The men of the _Schouven_--how many, Shawn? And how many more, before we ever saw the new lands?" "Does it matter? The vision is greater than the man." "Nay, I think not, but even let that be so if you wish. But if you follow the vision through blood and deceit, in mad denial of what your senses tell you, then you lose it. Maybe the vision is there yet, but you're mired down in your own folly. You're lost.... Shawn, you're truly compassed about, as you say." Ben raised his voice, knowing that in this windless air it must reach into the open cabin, if Jenks was in any condition to hear it. "Mills and Ledyard and Dummy are with me. Manuel won't fight for you. If Jack or Tom Ball would come on deck, they must pass my friends there at the hatch. I don't wish to fight you, Shawn, nor to harm you. We were friends. I know what you gave me and I value it. But you're lost. You're mired, and I will not go down with you. Now hear the alternatives. If you----" "I see," said Shawn, perhaps to himself. "I see you will not go with me, the way I should have known it all the while." "Shawn"--Ben understood that he himself was pleading--"Shawn, there are those who love me, or there were. My life is more to them than ever it was to you. You never knew me. You never saw me. You saw the image of a follower, and that you may have loved, but me you never saw. Now then--my life is all I own. I'm naked in every way. And if you'd take that from me I'll fight you to the last breath, and I'll win. Now hear the alternatives. Throw your knife away and give me that other key. Then, sir, I will not release Captain Jenks until he gives me his word that he will take you unharmed to Boston." "To man's justice!" said Shawn, and laughed. "No hearing. The short gasp on the tricing line and all vision dead!" "Men know little enough about justice, that's true. And so I'll give you another alternative. If you will yield, I'll even set you free in a boat when we raise the Cape--as you could have done for me a year ago when I told you plain I'd have no part of your venture."