Before I had recovered all my component parts the _Royal Duke_ was off.
It was not the slightest comfort to me to reflect that if only I had dashed on board the moment I saw my man, and arrested him there and then, we might both be standing at this moment comparatively happy on that quay whose lights blinked unkindly, now above us, now below, now one side, now the other, as we rolled out of the harbour.
"Bit of a sea outside, I guess," said a voice at my side.
Outside! Then what was going on now did not count! I clapped my hat down on my head and made for the cabin door.
It had entered my mind to penetrate into the steerage at once and make sure of my runaway; but when I contemplated the distance of deck between where I now stood and where I had seen him disappear; and when, moreover, as the boat's head quitted the lee of the breakwater a big billow from the open leapt up at her and washed her from stem to stern, something within me urged me to go below at once, and postpone business till the morning.
I have only the vaguest recollection of the ghastly hours which ensued.
I have a wandering idea of a feeble altercation with a steward on hearing that all the berths were occupied and that he had nowhere to put me.

Then I imagine I must have lain on the saloon floor or the cabin stairs; at least, the frequency with which I was trodden upon was suggestive of my resting-place being a public thoroughfare.
But the treading under foot was not quite so bad as being called upon to show my ticket later on.

That was a distinctly fiendish episode, and I did not recover from it all the night.

More horrible still, a few brutes, lost to all sense of humanity, attempted to have supper in the saloon, within a foot or two of where I lay.

Mercifully, their evil machinations failed, for nothing could stay on the table.
Oh, the horrors of that night! Who can say at what angles I did not incline?
Now, as we swooped up a wave I stood on my head, next moment I shivered and shuddered in mid-air.