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“Mr. Todd,” called the captain, “come down here–port main-rigging.”

The mate came quickly, as he always did when he heard the prefix to his name. It was used only in emergencies.

“What soundings did you get at the lead when we were blowing out?” asked the captain. “What water did you have when you sang out ‘a quarter six’ and ‘a quarter less six’?”

“N-n-one, capt’n. There warn’t any bottom. I jess wanted to get you to drop the other anchor and hold her off the reef.”

“Got him tight, cappen?” asked the mate. “Shall I help you hold ‘im?”

“I’ve got my sight back. I’ve got Tom Plate under my gun. How long have you been flying signals of distress, Tom Plate?”

“Ever since I could see, capt’n,” answered the trembling sailor.

“How long is that?”

“Second day out, sir.”

“What’s your idea in keeping still about it? What could you gain by being taken aboard a man-of-war?”

“I didn’t want to have all the work piled on me jess ’cause I could see, capt’n. I never thought anybody could ever see again. I slept partly under No. 2 gun that night, and didn’t get it so bad.”

“You sneaked into my room, got my keys, and raided the treasure-chests. You know what the rules say about that? Death without trial.”

“No, I didn’t, capt’n; I didn’t.”

“Search him, Mr. Todd.”

The search brought to light a tobacco-pouch in which were about fifty unset diamonds and a few well-jeweled solid-gold ornaments, which the captain pocketed.

“Not much of a haul, considering what you left behind,” he said calmly. “I suppose you only took what you could safely hide and swim with.”

“I only took my share, sir; I did no harm; I didn’t want to be driftin’ round wi’ blind men. How’d I know anybody could ever see any more?”

“Sad mistake, Tom. All we wanted, it seems, was a good scalding with hot coffee.” He mused a few moments, then continued: “There must be some medical virtue in hot coffee which the doctors haven’t learned, and–well–Tom, you’ve earned your finish.”

“You won’t do it, capt’n; you can’t do it. The men won’t have it; they’re with me,” stuttered the man.

“Possibly they are. I heard you all growling down the hatch yesterday morning. You’re a pack of small-minded curs. I’ll get another crew. Mr. Todd,” he said to the listening mate, “steward told me he was out of coffee, so we’ll break a bag out o’ the lazarette. It’s a heavy lift–two hundred pounds and over–’bout the weight of a man; so we’ll hoist it up. Let Tom, here, rig a whip to the spanker-gaff. He can see.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” answered the mate. “Get a single block and a strap and a gant-line out o’ the bo’s’n’s locker, Tom.”

“Is it all right, capt’n?” asked Tom, lowering his hands with a deep sigh of relief. “I did what seemed right, you know.”

“Rig that whip,” said Swarth, turning his back and ascending the poop.

Tom secured the gear, and climbing aloft and out the gaff, fastened the block directly over the lazarette-hatch, just forward of the binnacle. Then he overhauled the rope until it reached the deck, and descended.

“Come up here on the poop,” called the captain; and he came.

“Shall I go down and hook on, sir?” he asked zealously.

“Make a hangman’s noose in the end of the rope,” said Swarth.

“Eh–what–a runnin’ bowline–a timber-hitch? No, no,” he yelled, as he read the captain’s face. “You can’t do it. The men—-“

“Make a hangman’s knot in the end of the rope,” thundered the captain, his pistol at Tom’s ear.

With a face like that of a death’s-head he tied the knot.

“Pass it round your neck and draw it tight.”

Hoarse, inarticulate screams burst from the throat of the man, ended by a blow on the side of his face by the captain’s iron-hard fist. He fell, and lay quiet, while Swarth himself adjusted the noose and bound the hands with his own handkerchief. The men at the wheel strained their necks this way and that, with tense waves of conflicting expressions flitting across their weary faces, and the men forward, aroused by the screams, stood about in anxious expectancy until they heard Swarth’s roar: “Lay aft here, the watch!”

They came, feeling their way along by rail and hatch.

“Clap on to that gant-line at the main fife-rail, and lift this bag of coffee out o’ the lazarette,” sang out the captain.

They found the loose rope, tautened it, hooked the bight into an open sheave in the stanchion, and listlessly walked forward with it. When they had hoisted the unconscious Tom to the gaff, Swarth ordered: “Belay, coil up the fall, and go forrard.”

They obeyed, listlessly as ever, with no wondering voice raised to inquire why they had not lowered the coffee they had hoisted.

Captain Swarth looked at the square-rigged ship, now on the port quarter–an ill-defined blur to his imperfect vision. “Fine chance we’d have had,” he muttered, “if that happened to be a bulldog. Angel,” he said, as the mate drew near, “hot coffee is good for moon-blindness, taken externally, as a blistering agent–a counter-irritant. We have no fly-blisters in the medicine-chest, but smoking-hot grease must be just as good, if not better than either. Have the cook heat up a potful, and you get me out a nice small paint-brush.”

Forty-eight hours later, when the last wakening vision among the twenty men had taken cognizance of the grisly object aloft, the gaff was guyed outboard, the rope cut at the fife-rail, and the body of Tom Plate dropped, feet first, to the sea.

Then when Captain Swarth’s eyes permitted he took an observation or two, and, after a short lecture to his crew on the danger of sleeping in tropic moonlight, shaped his course for Barbados Island, to take up the burden of his battle with fate where the blindness had forced him to lay it down; to scheme and to plan, to dare and to do, to war and to destroy, against the inevitable coming of the time when fate should prove the stronger–when he would lose in a game where one must always win or die.