with them." "But I will tell yeh," says O'Sullivan; "I'm wantin' to throw 'em over the side." And with that I turns to walk away, but O'Sullivan says, very polite and seducin'-like, still a-stroppin' the razor, "Mr. Fay," says he, "will you kindly step this way an' have your throat cut?" And with that I knew my life was in danger, and Ihave come to make report to you, sir, that the man is a violent lunatic.'
"Or soon will be," I remarked. "I noticed him yesterday, a big man muttering continually to himself?""That's the man," Mr. Mellaire said.
"Do you have many such at sea?" I asked.
"More than my share, I do believe, sir."
He was lighting a cigarette at the moment, and with a quick movement he pulled off his cap, bent his head forward, and held up the blazing match that I might see.
I saw a grizzled head, the full crown of which was not entirely bald, but partially covered with a few sparse long hairs. And full across this crown, disappearing in the thicker fringe above the ears, ran the most prodigious scar I had ever seen. Because the vision of it was so fleeting, ere the match blew out, and because of the scar's very prodigiousness, I may possibly exaggerate, but I could have sworn that I could lay two fingers deep into the horrid cleft and that it was fully two fingers broad. There seemed no bone at all, just a great fissure, a deep valley covered with skin; and I was confident that the brain pulsed immediately under that skin.
He pulled his cap on and laughed in an amused, reassuring way.
"A crazy sea cook did that, Mr. Pathurst, with a meat-axe. We were thousands of miles from anywhere, in the South Indian Ocean at the time, running our Easting down, but the cook got the idea into his addled head that we were lying in Boston Harbour, and that I wouldn't let him go ashore. I had my back to him at the time, and I never knew what struck me.""But how could you recover from so fearful an injury?" I questioned.
"There must have been a splendid surgeon on board, and you must have had wonderful vitality."He shook his head.
"It must have been the vitality . . . and the molasses.""Molasses!"
"Yes; the captain had old-fashioned prejudices against antiseptics.
He always used molasses for fresh wound-dressings. I lay in my bunk many weary weeks--we had a long passage--and by the time we reached Hong Kong the thing was healed, there was no need for a shore surgeon, and I was standing my third mate's watch--we carried third mates in those days."Not for many a long day was I to realize the dire part that scar in Mr. Mellaire's head was to play in his destiny and in the destiny of the Elsinore. Had I known at the time, Captain West would have received the most unusual awakening from sleep that he ever experienced; for he would have been routed out by a very determined, partially-dressed passenger with a proposition capable of going to the extent of buying the Elsinore outright with all her cargo, so that she might be sailed straight back to Baltimore.
As it was, I merely thought it a very marvellous thing that Mr.
Mellaire should have lived so many years with such a hole in his head.
We talked on, and he gave me many details of that particular happening, and of other happenings at sea on the part of the lunatics that seem to infest the sea.
And yet I could not like the man. In nothing he said, nor in the manner of saying things, could I find fault. He seemed generous, broad-minded, and, for a sailor, very much of a man of the world. It was easy for me to overlook his excessive suavity of speech and super-courtesy of social mannerism. It was not that. But all the time I was distressingly, and, I suppose, intuitively aware, though in the darkness I couldn't even see his eyes, that there, behind those eyes, inside that skull, was ambuscaded an alien personality that spied upon me, measured me, studied me, and that said one thing while it thought another thing.
When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that Ihad been talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature.
The other half had not spoken. Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and quick, behind the mask of words and flesh.
