Dan'l smiled unpleasantly. "All right; but Mauger says he did it."
Brander shook his head. "He didn't. For a good reason. He was flat on the floor, and I was kneeling on his back, between him and Slatter, when Slatter yelled and quit fighting...."
Dan'l groped for the whale-oil lamp and lighted it and bent to look at the knife. "How did it kill him, there?" he demanded.
"Struck the big thigh artery," said Brander. "It must have...."
Then Noll Wing's voice came to them from the scuttle. "What's wrong, below?" And his big bulk slid down the ladder....
Brander's explanation was the one that went down in the log, in the end. Noll wrote it himself, in the irregular and straggling characters which his trembling fingers formed. And that was Faith's doing; for Dan'l did not believe, or affected not to believe, and Noll was too shaken by the tragedy to know what he believed.
Dan'l and Noll and Faith talked it over between them, in the after cabin, the next morning. Faith had slept through the disturbance of the night before; but when she heard of it in the morning it absorbed her. She went on deck and found Brander and made him tell her what had happened. He described the outbreak in the fo'c's'le; he told how, when he went forward, he smelled liquor on the men.... How he dropped through the fo'c's'le scuttle, and some one knocked the lamp from its hanging, and Slatter rushed him.
"Mauger saw what the man meant," he said. "He jumped on him from the side; and then I took a hand; and we had it for a while, in a heap on the floor."
The other men in the fo'c's'le had fled to the deck, leaving Slatter to do his own work. "I made him let go of the knife," Brander explained, "and after we had banged around for a while, I got him from behind, my arms under his, my hands clasped behind his neck. I bent him over, forward.... He was trying to get hold of my throat, over his shoulder.... And he yelled and let go...."