The absence of a chaperon puzzled him.  The two other women at the table, a Mrs. Weston and her daughter, had evidently just met her, and the captain seemed to be the only one who had known her before.  He called her “Bobby,” and treated her with the easy familiarity of a big brother.

“Don’t talk to me about Wyoming!” he was saying now, in answer to some boast of hers.  “Anybody can have it that wants it.  I make ’em a present of it, with Dakota thrown in.  You remember, Bobby, the last time I was at the ranch?  All hands on deck at two bells in the morning watch, a twenty-mile sail on a bucking bronco, then back to the ranch, where we shipped a cargo of food that would sink a tramp, A gallon or so of soup in the hold, a saddle of venison, a broiled antelope, and six vegetables in the forward hatchway, with three kinds of pie in the bunkers.  It was a regular food jag three times a day.  It took me just two weeks at sea to get over those two days on land.”

Percival stirred uneasily.  His tea and toast were long in coming, and a certain haunted look was dawning on his face.  Through the port-holes he could see the deep-purple sky rising to give place to still deeper-purple sea as the ship rose with sickening regularity.  He took an olive.

“Isn’t there a good deal of motion?” asked Mrs. Weston, a delicate, appealing blonde, whose opinions were always tentative until they received the stamp of masculine approval.

“Motion!” thundered the captain, bringing down a huge tattooed fist on the table.  “Isn’t that like a woman?  When I have ordered this calm weather especially for Mrs. Weston’s benefit!  I’ve a good mind to whistle for a hurricane.”

“No, no, please!” she protested in mock terror.

Percival turned away from the foolish chatter.  Matters of a deep and sinister nature occupied his mind.  He felt within him wars and rumors of wars.  He wished that the curtains would stop swinging out from the wall in that silly fashion.  It was deuced uncanny to see them hang at an angle of twenty-five degrees, then slowly and mysteriously fall back into their places.  He tried not to watch them, but it was even more dangerous to look at the man next him breaking soft-boiled eggs into a glass tumbler.  He took another olive.

An electric fan overhead whirred incessantly, and the bright, flashing blades smote his eyes with diabolical precision.  The circular motion, instead of cooling him, brought beads of perspiration to his brow.

“Who’ll have some Chinese chow?” asked the captain.  “I always order a dish or two the first night out.  Can’t give you any birds’-nest soup—­”

A violent shudder passed over Percival, and he made a lightning calculation of the distance from the table to the stairway.  In doing so he noted that it was a spiral stairway.  Why in the name of heaven was everything round?  The port-holes, the revolving-chairs, the electric fans, the plates, the olives—­