Some of my rage had gone out of me in my fight to windward in the gale's teeth; but when[216] I saw John close by me there it all came back to me. For half a minute the thought was in my head to run him down and sink him—and I had the wind of him and could have done it. Even in my rage, though, I could not play a coward trick like that on him; and before I could make any other plan up he set me in the way of one himself.  
"I'm making for the Wreck Gat," he sung out. "Give me a lead in, George—'tis better known to thee than to me."
 
Had I stopped to think about it, his asking me to lead him in would have been a puzzle to me, he being just as good a sailor as I was and just as well knowing every twist of the sea and the sands. But I didn't stop to think about the queerness of what he wanted—why he was for making things double safe by my leading him is clear enough to me now—because my wits were at work at something else.
 
While the words were coming out of his mouth—it all was in my head like a flash—I saw my way to settling with him, and to settling fair. He was crazy to want to try for it through the Wreck Gat on the half tide, with the run of the ebb meeting the onset of the breakers and a whole gale blowing. But his being crazy[217] that way was his look out, not mine. I'd give him the lead in that he wanted—asking him to take nothing that I didn't take first myself, and giving him a better chance than I had because I'd be setting the course for him and he'd have only to follow on. That either of us would pull through would be as it might be. As to my own chance, such as it was, I was ready for it: knowing that I would be no worse off dead with him than I was living with him—and a long sight better off if I put him in the way of the drowning that would finish him, and yet myself won through alive.
 
That was what got into my head like a flash while he was hailing me, and mighty pleased I was with it. "Follow on," I sung out. "I'll give thee a lead." And to myself I was saying: "Yes, a lead to hell!"
 
"All right," he sung out back to me—and let his boat fall off a bit that I might draw ahead of him. As he dropped astern, and the uptilt of his weather rail no longer hid the inside of his boat from me, I saw that there was a biggish bunch of something covered with a tarpaulin' in the stern sheets close by his feet. But I gave no thought to it: all my thought being fixed on what was ahead of me and him[218] in the next half hour. I was glad that we had to wait a little. Every minute of waiting meant more wind, and so a bigger fight in the Wreck Gat between the out-running current and the in-running sea. I had a feeling in my bones that I would pull through and that he wouldn't, and I was keen to see the smash of him as his boat took the sands. After that smash came, the rest of his life could be counted in minutes and seconds—as he floundered and drowned in that wild tumble of sand-thickened waves. So I'd have done with him and be quit of him; and would have a good show—if I didn't drown along with him—for winning Tess for my own. If I did drown with him, or if—not being drowned—Tess would have none of me, there still would be this much to the good: I'd have served him out for crossing me in my deep heart-wish, and I'd have made certain that he and she never could come together in this world alive.
 
All that I was thinking as I stood on ahead of him, bucketing through the waves that every minute were heavier with the churned up sand. And I also was thinking, and I remember laughing as the thought came to me, that there was a sort of rightness in the way things were work[219]ing out with us—seeing that the ship that had brought me my Tess, and the sea that had given her to me, together were making the death-trap for the man who had stolen away from me her love.
 
The wind was well up to a gale as we drove on together, me leading him by a half dozen boats' lengths, and from all along to leeward of us came to us through the mist a sort of a groaning roar as the breakers went banging and grinding on the Barnard Bank. Nothing but having the wind and the sea both with us, when we stood in for the gat, saved us from foundering; and yet that same also put us in peril of it, because we had a wide open chance of being pooped by the great following waves which came hanging over and dragging at our sterns.
 
The mist thinned ............