It was the expression of his face that
startled me. The habitual sourness had vanished. All that I could
see was anxiety and apprehension . . . yes, and age. I had never
seen him look so old; for there, at that moment, I beheld the wastage
and weariness of all his sixty-nine years of sea-battling and sea-
staring.
I slipped away from the port and went along the deck to the break of
the poop, where I held on and stood staring through the gray and
spray in the conjectural direction of our drift. Somewhere, there,
in the north-east and north, I knew was a broken, iron coast of rocks
upon which the graybeards thundered. And there, in the chart-room, a
redoubtable sailorman bent anxiously over a chart as he measured and
calculated, and measured and calculated again, our position and our
drift.
And I knew it could not be. It was not the Samurai but the henchman
who was weak and wrong. Age was beginning to tell upon him at last,
which could not be otherwise than expected when one considered that
no man in ten thousand had weathered age so successfully as he.
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