The red man fell back on bended legs—the knee of one popping terribly. His face looked up to Mickey—eyes oddly forgiving and kind, as if everything about the world and their relationship to it had changed on that moment. Sam was crying over Jonah, and Mickey was standing entranced over the broken man, whose chest was heaving unevenly, his breaths ragged and agonized.

Something seemed to cloud Mickey's face like a torment, and he dropped to his knees next to the mysterious red man, who had finally seemed to tire. Clay stepped over to the prone man and kneeled by his side. Just then they noticed that a cross of Christ was tattooed over the man’s heart, the very spot where Mickey had punched him, a spot sunken now, and swelling like a water-skin being filled.

The red man’s eyes seemed to take them both in and he smiled. Mickey gasped and grabbed the hand of the right arm he had just broken and placed it over the heart cross. His voice was cracking with emotion, “I di' not mean to kill ya, Old Penny. I see we're both catholic, ya and I.”

The man’s face then twitched and he croaked a response that stuck in his throat. He then began to seize up and shiver. Even in this he seemed determined to take one last look at his quarry. He arched his big head on his strong neck and looked back behind him into the lantern light. Clay’s hands darted to help the man tilt his head as a last kindness—for it seemed to be his wish to look into the eyes of the crazy white man.

Mickey and Clay followed his gaze to the yellow pool of lamp light that was the stern deck of the Blue Baby Beth. What they saw was chilling. Sam lay crying next to the body of Jonah, the man who had been busy teaching him to read. Next to the spreading pool of Jonah’s spilt blood danced the ragged, filthy, tattered form of the tall, crazed white man. His dirty right hand was swollen and flapping on a broken wrist. The other arm was wrapped maniacally around the curious spiral-shaped leather case.

The man was standing, looking into the eyes of Old Penny. Old Penny then tried to speak and, with the effort, gave up his ghost, rolling to the shoulder on Mickey’s side with a spasm. With that the crazed white man hooted in some strange language and then, despite the terrible state of his feet, the sore and bleeding toes of which protruded from his shredded rich man’s boots, he began to dance, a dance insane, without a rhythm, with no beat, or with any time at all—just a frantic cavorting.

Sam’s eyes were wide with terror. Clay turned his face to Mickey who was doing the same. His wild savior then said solemnly, “I b’lieve, Blackie, that I just knocked the life out a the wrong man.”

Their eyes then returned to the form of the cavorting white man, made all the more hideous by his great height and rank smell. Just then the man let out a cackling chant, which he persisted with, “Dick. Dick! Dick!! Dick!!! Diiiick!!!!”

Clay, finally over the shock of the dunking, the shark feasting, and scramble aboard, spoke without thinking, which was sometimes his way. When he spoke so, he was often told—and indeed had taken notice himself—that he sounded like an old man, and so he sounded now, “That is a devil’s dance if ever there was one.”