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“And why, perdy, did’st thou jam thy foot on mine till the bones crunched? I'll have thy heart’s blood.”

“Nay,” the man replied, so quietly, so calmly that he might have been a clerk sitting on his stool, ‘‘you have a way of talking overmuch, fellow, and I have a misliking of speech that babbles like a brook. It can make trouble.”

Martin stopped as if he had lost his voice, but continued to glare at the stranger, who still regarded him with no concern.

“It is thy weakness, fellow,” he said, ‘‘and — ” he looked very hard at Martin — “it may yet be the occasion of thine untimely end.”

For a moment Martin stood still, then, swallowing once or twice, he went out of the dimly lighted forecastle into the darkness of the deck.

"He appears,” the little man said, addressing the others, ‘‘to be an excitable fellow. Alas, what trouble a brisk tongue can bring upon a man!”

The little man, Harry Malcolm, looked from one to another and longest at Phil.

Now Phil could not say there had been a hidden meaning in the hard look the little man had given Martin or in the long look the little man had given Phil himself. But he knew that whether this was so or not, there was no more to be got that night from Martin, and he in turn, further bepuzzled by the little man’s words and after all not much enlightened by Martin’s blunder, left the forecastle to seek the main deck.

Passing the great cannon lashed in their places, and leaving behind him the high forecastle, he came into the shadow of the towering poop on which the lantern glowed yellow in the blue moonlight, and continued aft