"I see what's come, sir," said Sutton, and though he was white under his stains he never flinched. "And Wickwire, he saw what would come. He was trying to stop me the night I dropped him into the river—when we quarreled. Because, d'y'see, from fooling with the works of life just to learn how they're made I'd begun fooling with the works of hell. And he had found me out."
"Ah," said Raff, with one of his rare flashes. "That was how you knew the road to Li Chwan's!"
"To Li Chwan's—and—other places. I've been hitting it pretty regular for six months or so. The chief tried to save me, but I wouldn't hearken, and there, as you say—there's the result. It's just as if he'd done it all as a sacrifice, to show me. It's just as if—as if he'd paid for mine with the price of his own immortal soul!"...
We stared at him, a tattered ruin but an upstanding youngster, and we could sense no flaw in him now. He had come to grips with raw truth for once without failing—not without a falter, you understand, for he had to put aside a boy's pride and a last illusion in himself—but clear-eyed, the straight way, as every man likes to think he might have done in his own youth.
"Well," said Raff at last. "What's your notion?" Sutton drew a deep breath.
"You know, sir, the chief never took any note of time. One day or another—one month or another, it was all alike to him. Well, here it is: Why can't we strike out these seven weeks and three days from his memory—as if they never had been? We're fixed just as we were when we lost him. He's in his own bed, the ship's in the same berth, just coaled: same weather, same crew, same folk about him—same everything. He wakes up—wouldn't he think the whole mess had been a dream?... Wouldn't he? Couldn't we make him, just as they did with the Johnny here?" He hammered the book for emphasis. "'Would not the beggar then forget himself?'"
We winked as it burst upon us. Here was one beggar who had forgotten himself, anyway: his vanity, his posing, his weakness, in the fervor of a real idea.
"Perhaps there's something in make-believe after all—some merit. Perhaps it's got some truth in it too. It mightn't work, but I feel it must and will. I got the tip from the very book I gammoned him with, from the very passage he must have marked himself at random—d'y'see? And if he should come right—"
"Whist!" breathed the captain. "He's stirrin' now!"
The lank form on the bunk had moved. The bandaged head turned, and Chris Wickwire looked up from his pillow. His gaze traveled slowly over the bare, familiar details of the cabin, the racks and lockers, the deck beams above, the panels on the bulkhead, his own spare garments on their hooks—passed over our huddled group by the door and rested at the open port, its brass rim shining with the new daylight. He lay so for a time, tossed a little restlessly, and seemed to seek something. And then—