We all three stared as though the white cloth had veritably been a monster wing endowed with life.
"Sails don't rise of themselves!" I exclaimed, and was at the mast before the words were out of my lips.

Crouched behind it was a man.

I should have known him even without the aid of the moon.

Often enough, God knows, I had seen him crouched like this beside me, ourselves in ambush awaiting some unwary foe, brute or human; or ourselves in hiding, holding our breath lest it should betray us.

The minister who had been a player, the rival who would have poisoned me, the servant who would have stabbed me, the wife who was wife in name only,--mine were strange shipmates.
He rose to his feet and stood there against the mast, in the old half-submissive, half-defiant attitude, with his head thrown back in the old way.
"If you order me, sir, I will swim ashore," he said, half sullenly, half--I know not how.
"You would never reach the shore," I replied.