“Cappy, cappy! He scored on you there. What say to that?”
“I will say—” began Captain Brack, but Chanler had tired of his sport as suddenly as he had become interested.
“Rot, rot!” he said, tapping on the table. “You were going to amuse us with your new finds. Let’s have it.”
“Very well,” said the captain, arising. “It will be ready in fifteen minutes.”
I was glad of that respite of fifteen minutes. It gave me an opportunity to slip into my stateroom and pull myself together. Brack had shaken and stirred me as I had not thought possible. His terrific personality had exerted upon me the effects of a powerful stimulant. Once or twice in my life I had taken whisky in sufficient quantity to cause me to experience thoughts, emotions, elations which did not properly belong in the normal, self-controlled Me. Now I experienced something of the same sensation. My mind was buzzing with a hundred swift impressions and conjectures upon Brack.
The picture I had beheld and the words I had heard through the swinging doors of Billy Taylor’s repeated themselves to me, and I felt the same sensation of a chill that I had felt upon recognizing in Brack the big man from the saloon. The words which the small man had uttered were fraught with sinister suggestion. From them it was apparent that he recognized in the captain a man who was known as “Laughing Devil,” whose reputation, if the seaman’s words might be taken for truth, was not of the sort that one would care to have in the captain of the yacht on which one was sailing into far seas. Also it was apparent from the man’s words that Brack had made some sort of proposition: “a rich sucker,” had been mentioned.
My course was plain before me: to go to Chanler’s state-room, tell him what I had seen and heard, and demand that he investigate Brack’s actions or permit me to resign my position. I had no definite idea of what the words between Brack and Madigan might portend, but there was no doubt that they established faithfully the captain’s character. In my depressed condition I shuddered at the idea of putting to sea with such a man.
But—Captain Brack had smiled. That smile stopped me. The appalling brutality of the captain’s mental processes had started within me a slow, steady flame. It was ghastly; the man’s expression had shown that he considered me a thing to play with! The brute had looked in my eyes, had stripped me to the marrow, read me for a weakling, and smiled, so that I might know that he had seen all! And the worst of it was that he was doing it with a mind which weighed me calmly, without prejudice, with scientific calmness.
It was not fair, it was not human. The man should at least have refrained from forcing me to see how weak he considered me. And was I so weak? Was I the worm he thought me to be?
“No!” I cried aloud; and I was pacing the floor when Simmons knocked on my door.