"Well," Brander chuckled, "others want to know. They're not sleeping well of nights, for wanting...."
"Do you, or don't you?" Roy insisted.
Brander leaned toward him and whispered amiably: "I'll tell you, the day we touch at home," he promised. "Now—run along."
Thus they were all concerned; but Noll Wing took the matter harder than any, because Mauger, whom he feared, was concerned in it. His worry over it gave him one sleepless night; he rose in that night and found the whiskey.... And for the first time in all his life, Noll Wing drank himself into a stupor.
He had always been a steady drinker; he had often been inflamed with liquor. But his stomach was strong; he could carry it; he had never debauched himself.
This time, he became like a log, and Faith found him, when she woke in the morning, unclean with his own vomitings, sodden and helpless as a snoring log. He lay thus two days.... And he woke at last with a scream of fright, and swore that Mauger was at him with a knife, so that Dan'l and Willis Cox had to hold the man quiet till the hallucination passed.