He saw his men draw back from him.
"Have we been captained all this time by a codfish!" they muttered.

"It is lowering to our pride." They were his dogs snapping at him, but, tragic figure though he had become, he scarcely heeded them.

Against such fearful evidence it was not their belief in him that he needed, it was his own.

He felt his ego slipping from him.

"Don't desert me, bully," he whispered hoarsely to it.
In his dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions.