Beginning at the right temple, a ghastly scar split the cheek-bone, sank into the depths of the hollow cheek, notched across the lower jaw, and plunged to disappearance among the prodigious skin-folds of the neck.  The withered lobes of both ears were perforated by tiny gypsy-like circles of gold.  On the skeleton fingers of his right hand were no less than five rings—­not men’s rings, nor women’s, but foppish rings—­“that would fetch a price,” Daughtry adjudged.  On the left hand were no rings, for there were no fingers to wear them.  Only was there a thumb; and, for that matter, most of the hand was missing as well, as if it had been cut off by the same slicing edge that had cleaved him from temple to jaw and heaven alone knew how far down that skin-draped neck.

The Ancient Mariner’s washed eyes seemed to bore right through Daughtry (or at least so Daughtry felt), and rendered him so uncomfortable as to make him casually step to the side for the matter of a yard.  This was possible, because, a servant seeking a servant’s billet, he was expected to stand and face the four seated ones as if they were judges on the bench and he the felon in the dock.  Nevertheless, the gaze of the ancient one pursued him, until, studying it more closely, he decided that it did not reach to him at all.  He got the impression that those washed pale eyes were filmed with dreams, and that the intelligence, the thing, that dwelt within the skull, fluttered and beat against the dream-films and no farther.

“How much would you expect?” the captain was asking,—­a most unsealike captain, in Daughtry’s opinion; rather, a spick-and-span, brisk little business-man or floor-walker just out of a bandbox.

“He shall not share,” spoke up another of the four, huge, raw-boned, middle-aged, whom Daughtry identified by his ham-like hands as the California wheat-farmer described by the departed steward.

“Plenty for all,” the Ancient Mariner startled Daughtry by cackling shrilly.  “Oodles and oodles of it, my gentlemen, in cask and chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand.”

“Share—­what, sir?” Daughtry queried, though well he knew, the other steward having cursed to him the day he sailed from San Francisco on a blind lay instead of straight wages.  “Not that it matters, sir,” he hastened to add.  “I spent a whalin’ voyage once, three years of it, an’ paid off with a dollar.  Wages for mine, an’ sixty gold a month, seein’ there’s only four of you.”

“And a mate,” the captain added.

“And a mate,” Daughtry repeated.  “Very good, sir.  An’ no share.”

“But yourself?” spoke up the fourth man, a huge-bulking, colossal-bodied, greasy-seeming grossness of flesh—­the Armenian Jew and San Francisco pawnbroker the previous steward had warned Daughtry about.  “Have you papers—­letters of recommendation, the documents you receive when you are paid off before the shipping commissioners?”