 civilization. He is certainly an individualist of
the most pronounced type. Not only that, but he is very lonely. There is no
congeniality between him and the rest of the men aboard ship. His tremendous
virility and mental strength wall him apart. They are more like children to him,
even the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to their
level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies. Or else he probes them
with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in their mental processes
and examining their souls as though to see of what soul-stuff is made.
    I have seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter or that,
with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of interest, pondering their
actions or replies or petty rages with a curiosity almost laughable to me who
stood onlooker and who understood. Concerning his own rages, I am convinced that
they are not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the main
they are the habits of a pose or attitude he has seen fit to take toward his
fellowmen. I know, with the possible exception of the incident of the dead mate,
that I have not seen him really angry; nor do I wish ever to see him in a
genuine rage, when all the force of him is called into play.
    While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas Mugridge
in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident upon which I have
already touched once or twice. The twelve o'clock dinner was over, one day, and
I had just finished putting the cabin in order, when Wolf Larsen and Thomas
Mugridge descended the companion stairs. Though the cook had a cubby-hole of a
stateroom opening off from the cabin, in the cabin itself he had never dared to
linger or to be seen, and he flitted to and fro, once or twice a day, like a
timid spectre.
    »So you know how to play Nap,« Wolf Larsen was saying in a pleased sort of
voice. »I might have guessed an Englishman would know. I learned it myself in
English ships.«
    Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile, so pleased was he
at chumming thus with the captain. The little airs he put on and the painful
striving to assume the easy carriage of a man born to a dignified place in life
would have been sickening had they not been ludicrous. He quite ignored my
presence, though I credited him with being simply unable to see me. His
