Part 6 (1/2)

There was an angry tone in his voice as he spoke these last words; and the tone was sharper a moment later when he went on: ”Can't you keep your owl eyes shet, you beast? Don't look at me like that, or I'll stick a knife into you. No, I'm _not_ starin' at you; it's you who's starin' at me, d.a.m.n you. Stop it! Stop it, I say, you--” and he broke out with a volley of foul names and curses; and partly raised himself, as though he thought that a fight was coming on. And then the pain which this movement caused him made him fall back again with a groan.

Without his asking for it I gave him another drink, which quieted him a little; and then put fresh strength into him, so that he burst out again with his curses and abuse. ”Cut the heart out of me, will you--you sc.u.m of rottenness? I'd have you to know that cuttin' hearts out is a game two can play at. Take that, d.a.m.n you! An' that! An'

that! Them's fur your starin'--you d.a.m.n fat-faced blinkin' owl. And I mean now t' keep on till I stop you. No more of your owl-starin' fur me! Take it agen, you stinkin' starin' owl. So! An' so! An' so!”

He fairly raised himself up in the berth as he rushed out his words, and at the same time thrust savagely with his right hand as though he had a knife in it. For a minute or more he kept his position, cursing with a strong voice and thrusting all the time. Suddenly he gave a yell of pain and fell on his back again, crying brokenly: ”h.e.l.l! It's _you_ who've finished me!” And then he gave two or three short sharp gasps, and after that there was a little gurgling in his throat, and then he was still--lying there as dead as any man could be.

This quick ending of him came so suddenly that it staggered me; but I must say that my first feeling, when I fairly realized what had happened, was thankfulness that his life was gone--for I had had enough of him to know that having much more of him would drive me mad.

In the telling of it, of course, most of what made all this horrible slips away from me, and it don't seem much to strain a man, after all.

But it really was pretty bad: what with the shadowy light in the state-room, for even with the port uncovered it still was dusky; and the horrid smell there; and the vividness with which the fellow somehow managed to make me feel those days and weeks of his half-crazy half-drunken life, while he and the other man stared at each other until neither of them could bear it any longer--and so took to fighting from sheer heart-breaking horror of loneliness and killed each other out of hand. And back of all that I had the feeling that I was caught in the same fate that had shut in upon them; and was even worse off than they had been, since I had no one to fight my life away with but must take it myself when I found my solitude in that rotten desolation more than I could stand.

Even the gin-and-water, though I took another big drink of it, could not hearten me; but it did give me the courage to rid myself of the two dead brutes by casting them overboard; and, indeed, getting rid of them was a necessity, for their presence seemed to me so befouling that I found it hard to breathe.

With the man on deck--except that touching him was hateful to me--I did not have much trouble. I just made fast to him a couple of heavy iron bars that I found down in the engine-room--pokers, they seemed to be, for serving the boiler fires--and then dragged him along the deck to a place where the bulwarks were gone and there shot him overboard.

And luckily the weed was thinnish there, and he went down like a stone into it and through it and so disappeared.

But with the man in the cabin I had a harder job. In his horridly cut condition I could not bring myself to touch him, and the best that I could do was to make a sort of bundle of him and the mattress and the bedclothes all together--with a bit of light line whipped around and around the whole ma.s.s until it was snug and firm. When it was finished I worked it out of the state-room, and rolled it fairly easily along the floor of the cabin to the companion-way--and there it stuck fast.

Budge it I could not; for it was too long to roll up the stair, and too heavy for me to haul it up after me or to push it up before me, though I tried both ways and tried hard. But in the end I managed to get it up by means of a purchase that I rigged from a ring-bolt in the deck just outside the companion-way door; and once having it on deck I could manage it again easily, for there I could roll it along.

Yet I did not at once cast it overboard; for I had no more iron bars with which to weight it, and I knew that such a bunch of stuff would not sink through the weed--and that I should have it still loathsomely with me, lying only partly hidden in the weed right alongside. In the end I got up a big iron cinder-bucket that I filled with coal--making sure that the coal would stay in it by las.h.i.+ng a piece of canvas over the top--and this I made fast to the bundle by a rope three or four fathoms long. Then I cast the bucket overboard through the break in the bulwarks, and as it shot downward I rolled the bundle after it--and I had the comfort of seeing the whole go down through the weed and away from my sight forever into the hidden water below.

And then I sat down on the deck and rested; for what little cheering and strength I had got from the gin-and-water had left me and I was utterly miserable and tired as a dog. But I was well quit of both my dead men, and that was a good job well done.

XVII

HOW I WALKED MYSELF INTO A MAZE

Sitting there with the splotches of fresh blood on the deck all around me was more than I could stomach for very long. The sight of them brought back to me with a horrid distinctness everything that I had seen since I came aboard the hulk: the dead man lying on the deck, the other man with his frightful wounds and his wild talk and his death in the midst of his pa.s.sionate ravings, and the disgusting work that I had been forced to do before I could hide their two bodies from my sight in the sea-depths beneath the tangled weed. And so, presently, I scrambled to my feet, thinking to get back to the _Hurst Castle_ again--where there was no taint of blood to bring up haunting visions and where, though it seemed a long while past to me, I had been in the company of honest and kindly men.

But when I turned toward this poor escape from my misery--which at best was but a change from a foul prison to a clean one--I saw that I could not easily compa.s.s it; for in the time that had pa.s.sed since I had made my jump in the morning--noon being by then upon me--the _Hurst Castle_ had swung around a little, being caught I suppose upon some bit of sunken wreckage, so that where the two s.h.i.+ps were nearest to each other there was an open reach of twenty feet or more across the weed.

This was too great a distance for a jump, seeing that it must be made from rail to rail without a run to give me a send-off; and yet it was so short that my not being able to cross it never even entered my mind. Had there been a mast standing on the hulk, with a yard fast to it, I could have rigged a rope from the yard-arm and swung myself across in a moment; but the decks being sea-swept, with nothing left standing on them, that way was not open to me; nor could I find a light spar--even the flag-staff at the stern being snapt away--that I could stretch across from one rail to the other and make a bridge of.

The only other thing that occurred to me was to tear off some of the doors in the cabin and to make of them a little raft that I could pa.s.s by, though I saw well enough that pus.h.i.+ng a raft through so dense a tangle even for that short distance would be a hard job. And then I had the thought that perhaps on the sailing-s.h.i.+p lying beside me I might find a sound boat, which would better answer my purpose since it could be the more easily moved through the weed. In point of fact I could not have moved a boat a single foot through that thicket without cutting a pa.s.sage for it, and I might have thrown overboard three or four doors and so made a bridge over the weed that would have borne me easily--but I did not know then as much about that strange sea-growth as I came to know later on.

As there was no hurry in one way, the s.h.i.+ps being so bedded fast there that they were certain not to move more than a few feet at the utmost, I hunted up some food before setting myself to what I knew would be a heavy task; finding cold victuals of a coa.r.s.e sort in the galley--left from the last meal that the two men had made there--and fairly fresh water in the tank. It was hard work eating, on board that foul s.h.i.+p and thinking of the foul hands which had made the food ready; but going without eating would have been harder, for I had the healthy appet.i.te of a sound young fellow three-and-twenty years old.

When I had finished my meal, and I got through it quickly, I made fast a line to the steamer's rail and slipped down it to the deck of the sailing-s.h.i.+p--a fine vessel of above a thousand tons, built of wood and on clipper lines. There was an immediate sense of relief in getting aboard of her, and away from the blood-stained steamer where the dead men had been; but I saw at a glance that what I was after was not there. She had carried four boats on her rail, as I could tell by the davits, and likely enough a long-boat on her fore-castle as well. But all of them were gone, and I could only hope--since they were not there for my use--that her crew had got safe away in them: as well enough might have happened when she was floating water-logged after the storm that had wrecked her was past.

Without stopping to explore her--and, indeed, after what I had found on the steamer, I had no fancy for explorations which might end in my stumbling upon still more horrors--I went on to a trim little brig lying on the other side of her; a beautiful little vessel, with all her spars and rigging save her bow-hamper in perfect order for sea-going--but showing by her broken bow-sprit that she had been in collision, and by her depth in the water that after the collision she had filled. Naturally enough, her boats were gone too; and so I left her and went on.

In the course of the next two hours or so I must have traversed more than a hundred wrecks--scrambling up or down from one to another, as they happened to lie low in the water or high out of it--and with all their differences of size and build finding them in one way the same: all of them were dead s.h.i.+ps which some sort of a sea-disaster had slain. And not one of them had a sound boat left on board. The same reason that kept me from exploring the first of them kept me from exploring any of them: the dread of finding in their shadowy depths grisly horrors in the way of dead men long lying there; and, indeed, I was distinctly warned to hurry away from some of them by the vile stenches which came to me and made my stomach turn sickish and my blood go cold.

I must have walked for a good mile, I suppose, over the dead bodies of these sea-killed s.h.i.+ps--and it was the most dismal walk that ever I had taken--before I realized that even if I found a boat and got it overboard it would be of no use to me, since there was no possibility of my getting back in it to my own hulk through that densely packed ma.s.s of wrecks and weed. Indeed, I should have perceived this plain certainty sooner had not the wondering curiosity which this strange walk bred in me lured me on and on. And then, being brought at last to a halt by my rational reflection, there came over me suddenly a queer s.h.i.+ver of doubt as to the direction in which the _Hurst Castle_ lay; and then a still more s.h.i.+vering doubt as to whether I should be able to get back to her again by the way that I had come, or by any way at all.