A violent ringing of the ship's bell and Emily calling him in a voice fraught with excitement aroused Paul. For a second he imagined he was still dreaming.  
"Paul! Paul! Quick!"
 
He sprang out on deck.
 
"Oh!" Emily gasped in relief. "I thought you would never wake. But look!" She pointed forward. "A boat's there! Right ahead! A man——There!"
 
Rubbing his sleep-bewildered eyelids, Paul made out a small white boat a point off the Daphne's weather bow and not more than five ship's lengths away. Yes, a man was standing up in it. He was beckoning wildly to the bark and to the sky in turn.
 
The boat was too far off to make out if the man were alone in it. Paul had to depend on his sight. The bark had been robbed of her glasses.
 
The Daphne was making about three knots an hour. While he had slept the breeze had lessened. The swell was practically gone.
 
"Haul her up three points," said Paul, facing the wheel. "Keep an eye on me. Every time I raise my right hand let her go off half a point. When I hold up my left: Haul up half a point—luff!"
 
With this instruction snapped at Emily, Paul ran forward, leaving her alone, bewildered, fearful of making a mistake. But he was satisfied she would understand. He held responsibility to be as much the mother of capacity as necessity is of invention.
 
By instinct alone Emily interpreted Paul's orders. She brought the Daphne to windward and until she could see the boat and its passenger's head just over the lee bow. She saw Paul spring into the fore shrouds with a coil of rope. As he did so he raised his left hand. The boat disappeared. She was sure the Daphne would run it down. Paul raised his right hand. The helmswoman let the bark go off half a point.
 
Paul, leaning over the rail at his last signal, tried to read a name on the stern of the little boat which came bobbing toward him. He failed.
 
An old man was standing up between the cockleshell's alter and second thwarts. He was babbling in delirium. His swollen tongue was protruding from his lips. He was bareheaded and his hairless crown seemed ready to burst open in fire. Now the boat was close enough to see that the derelict was alone. His clothing consisted of a shirt and trousers—dungarees. He answered Paul's hails with a leer of idiocy.
 
Emily steered so finely that the Daphne brought the boat alongside just abreast of the fore-rigging. As their sides touched, Paul dropped a running bowline over the old man's head and shoulders and a minute later hauled him over the side. The boat overturned as its occupant was jerked out of it and Paul regretfully saw it drift away.
 
The derelict crumpled in a heap at his rescuer's feet as he touched the deck. His face and neck and arms and feet were horribly sunburned. He was literally parboiled. It would have taken the woman who mothered him to recognize his pitiably swollen countenance. He was short and thick-set and between fifty-five and sixty years old. His horny nails and blunt work-worn fingers bespoke him a sailor.
 
Paul carried him up on the poop as the best place to work over him and laid him down in the lee of the lounge house.
 
"Oh, you poor, poor man!" Emily cried in sympathy at sight of him.
 
"This is terrible, little woman. I'm afraid we can do little for him."
 
Paul looked away from the stranger with a shudder. While he had been forward at the rescue and carrying the stranger aft the breeze had died away. All aloft was now idle.
 
"Can't I leave here and help you?" asked Emily. "We must try to save his life."
 
"It's a mighty unpleasant task for you."
 
"Don't think of me as being helpless, Paul. Please. I know I can do so many things. I'm not the same woman you met back there."
 
She looked away to the westward as she spoke.
 
"Come, then." He put the wheel in beckets. "Forward——Get some water out of the galley."
 
Emily ran to do as she was bidden and Paul went below to the medicine chest. The medical supplies provided some strychnine tablets and, tincturing a glass of water with this heart stimulant, the castaways took turn about forcing drops of the fluid between the cracked lips. Emily discovered a jar of beef extract among the stores and made up a little of this for the sufferer.
 
After two hours of careful and unceasing attention the derelict opened his rheumy eyes and stared at the sky for a second.
 
"Hello, stranger," said Paul. "Feeling better?"
 
The eyes closed again and the cracked lips muttered an inaudible blur of words. It was plainly an unconscious answer.
 
A little while later, as Paul was taking another observation of the sun, Emily thought she saw a gleam of consciousness in the faded gaze which found her face and held it.
 
"Are you from the bark Daphne—the Daphne?" she asked.
 
Both she and Paul had discussed the possibility of this being so.
 
"He—walked—'tween—gyves——"
 
This was the strange whispered utterance that came from the cracked lips.
 
"Paul, he is speaking."
 
Lavelle laid down his sextant and knelt beside the stranger.
 
"I asked him," the gold woman explained, "if he belonged to the Daphne. He——Listen——"
 
The cracked lips were speaking again.
 
"He—walked—'tween—'tween with—with gyves——"
 
The stranger was repeating what he had said to Emily.
 
Paul ran the words over under his breath. They sounded familiar. They had a rhythm that touched some cell of memory. Suddenly his mind groped upon discovery. Emily uttered an exclamation in the same instant. Both of them knew what the stranger was attempting to say.
 
"Don't you remember Hood's 'The Dream of Eugene Aram,' Paul?"
 
"Yes," he said with a nod. "'And Eugene Aram walked between, with gyves upon his wrists.'"
 
The line, as he repeated it, had a startling weirdness.
 
"What can the poor brain be thinking? What is hidden back of this strange thought?" Emily asked in a whisper.
 
"It may be as we have thought—that he belongs to the Daphne's crew. Perhaps in its disorder his brain is reflecting the crime committed aboard here in the words of Hood's poem. Yet one would imagine that if there is anything in the theory of crime suggesting crime that it would be something of the sea of which he would be thinking. Eugene Aram was a schoolmaster and he killed in the woods. This man is a sailor. There is no doubt about that."
 
"Could he have been the one——"
 
Emily shrank from the stranger at the thought which leaped into her mind.
 
"Don't think that, Emily. If he had a hand in what happened here——But let as not think of what's past."
 
Paul carried the derelict below and put him in the room next to the mate's. He swathed his burns in carron oil and tied him in the bunk so that the rolling of the vessel would not turn him out. The man had become unconscious again immediately after mumbling the bit of "Eugene Aram" which Emily had called Paul to hear. Lavelle left the derelict sleeping in apparent peace, but with a heart action that was extremely weak.
 
"If he lives he will be a Godsend toward helping us work ship," Paul told Emily as they went aft together to the lounge.
 
"May be that is why it was given to us to pick him up."
 <............