He was the man I had met in the Rue Joubert at Paris, the one styled Captain Black by my friend Hall.
The last link in the long chain was welded then. The whole truth of that weird document, so fantastical, so seemingly wild, so fearful, was made manifest; the dead man's words were vindicated, his every deduction was unanswerable. There on the great Atlantic waste, I had lived to see one of those terrible pictures which he had conceived in his long dreaming; and through all the excitement, above all the noise, I thought that I heard his voice, and the grim "Ahoys!" of my own seamen on the night he died.
This strange recognition was unknown to Roderick, who had never seen Captain Black, nor had any notion of his appearance. But he waited for some remark from me; yet, fearing to be heard, I only looked at him, and in that look he read all.
"Mark," he said, "it's time to go; we'll be the next when that ship's at the bottom."
"My God!" I answered, "he can't do such a thing as that. If I thought so, I would stand by here at the risk of a thousand lives——"
"That's wild talk. What can we do? He would shiver us up with one of his machine guns—and, besides, we have Mary on board."
Indeed, she stood by us as we spoke, very pale and quiet, looking where the two ships lay motionless, the boat from the one now at the very side of the black steamer, whose name, the Ocean King, we could plainly read. She had, unnoticed by us, seen the work of the last shell, which splintered the groaning vessel, and made her reel upon the water, and Mary's instinct told her that we stood where danger was.
"Don't you think you're better below, Mary?" asked Roderick; but she had her old answer—
"Not until you go; and why should I make any difference? I overheard what you said. Am I to stand between you and those men's lives?"
She clung to my arm as she spoke, and her boldness gave us new courage.