Chapter 7

Then the notion came to me that he took me for the dead man up on deck; I being about the dead fellow's size and build, and therefore looking very like him as I stood there with the light behind me and the shadows too deep for him to make out my face. And so, to ease his mind and get him quiet--and this was quite as much for my own sake as for his, for his wild fear was strangely horrible to witness--I spoke to him, asking him if he were badly hurt and if I could help him; and at the sound of my voice he gave a long sigh, as though of great relief, and in a moment said: "Who the devil are you, anyway? I thought you was Jack--come back after my killin' him to have another round with me. Is Jack true dead?"

"If you mean the man on deck," I answered, "he is true dead--as dead as any man can be with a cut straight through his heart."

He gave another sigh of relief, as though what I told him was a real comfort to him; and in a moment he said: "Well, that's a good job, and I'm glad of it. He's killed me, too, I reckon; but I'm glad I got in on him first an' fixed him fur his damn starin' at me. Now he's dead I guess he won't stare at me no more." He was silent for nearly a minute, and then he added: "Jest get me a drink, won't you? I'm all burnin' up inside. There's water in th' jug out there. An' put a good dash of gin in it--there's gin out there, too."

I got him some water from the jug on the cabin table, but when he tasted it and found that it was water only he began to swear at me for leaving out the gin; and when I added the gin--thinking that he probably was so used to strong drink as really to need a little to put some life into him--he took off the whole glassful at a gulp and asked for more.

I told him to wait for another drink until I should have a look at his hurts and see what I could do to better them; for, while hanging seemed to be what he deserved, I had a natural desire to ease the pain that was racking him--as I could tell by the gasps and groans which he was giving and by the sharp motions which he made.

"Jest shet your head an' gimme some more drink," he said in a surly way. "Jack's give me a dose that'll settle me, an' lookin' at me won't do no good--'cause there's nothin' to be done. He's ripped me up, Jack has, an' no man can live long that way. All I can do is to die happy--so it's a good thing there's lots of gin. You'll find a kag of it over there in th' fur corner. Me an' Jack filled it from th' spirit room yesterday, afore our fuss begun."

But I stuck out that I must have a look at his hurts first, and managed to open the dead-light--which luckily had not been screwed tight--and so had some light in the room; and in the end, finding that I would not give him a drink otherwise, he let me have my way. But I had only to take a glance over him to see that what he said about the other man having settled him was true enough; for he was cut in a dozen places savagely, and had one desperate slash--which had laid him all open about the waist--from which alone he was certain to die in a very little while.

There was nothing for me to do, and I did not know what was best to say to him; and while I was casting about in my mind to comfort him a little, for his horrible hurts could not but stir my pity, he settled the matter for both of us in his own way--grunting out that he guessed I'd found he knew what he was talking about, and then asking for more gin.

This time I gave it to him, and gave it to him strong--being certain that he was past hurting by it, and hoping that it might deaden his pain. And presently, when he asked for another drink, I gave him that too.

The liquor did make him easier, and it raised his spirits so much that he fell to swearing quite cheerfully at the man Jack who had given him his death--and seemed to feel a good deal better for freeing his mind that way. And after a while he began of his own accord to tell me about the wreck that he had passed through, and about what had come after it--only stopping now and then to ask for more gin-and-water, and gulping it down with such satisfaction that I gave him all he cared to have. Indeed, it was the only thing that I could do to ease him, and I knew that no matter how much he drank the end shortly would be the same.

As well as I could make out from his rambling talk, the storm that had wrecked him had happened about three months earlier: a tremendous burst of tempest that had sent everything to smash suddenly, and had washed the captain and first and second officers overboard--they all being on the bridge together--and three or four of the crew as well. At the same time the funnel was carried away, and such a deluge of water got down to the engine-room that the fires were drowned. This brought the engineers on deck and the coal-passers with them; and the coal-passers--"a beach-combin' lot," he called them--led in breaking into the spirit-room, and before long pretty much all the men of the crew were as drunk as lords. What happened after that for a while he did not know; but when he got sober enough to stagger up on deck he found the man Jack there--who also had just come up after sleeping off his drunk below somewhere--and they had the ship to themselves. The others might have found a boat that would float and tried their luck that way, or they might have been washed overboard. He didn't know what had become of them, and he didn't care. Then the hulk had taken to drifting slowly, and at the end of a month or so had settled into the berth where I found her; and since then the two of them had known that all chance of their getting back into the world again was gone.

"At first I didn't mind it much," he went on, "there bein' lashins to eat aboard, an' more to drink than me an' Jack ever'd hoped to get a show at in all our lives. But pretty soon Jack he begun to be worryin'. He'd get drunk, an' then he'd set an' stare at me like a damn owl--jest a-blinkin' and a-blinkin' his damn eyes. You hev no idee, ontil it's done to you, how worryin' it is when a drunken man jest sets an' stares at you fur hours together in that fool way. I give Jack fair warnin' time and agen when he was sober that I'd hurt him ef he kep' on starin' at me like that; but then he'd get drunk agen right off, an' at it he'd go. I s'pose I wouldn't 'a' minded it in a ornary way an' ashore, or ef we'd had some other folks around. But here we was jest alone--oh, it was terr'ble how much we was alone!--an' Jack more'n half the time like a damn starin' owl, till he a-most druv me wild."

"An' Jack said as how I was onbearable too. _He_ said it was me as stared at him--the damn fool not knowin' that I was only a-tryin' to squench his beastly owlin' by lookin' steady at him; an' he said he'd settle me ef I kep' on. An' so things went like that atween us fur days an' days--and all th' time nothin' near us but dead ships with mos' likely dead men fillin' 'em, an' him an' me knowin' we'd soon got to be dead too. An' the stinks out of th' rotten weed, and out of all th' rotten ships whenever a bit of wind breezed up soft from th' s'uthard over th' hull mess of 'em, was horrider than you hev any idee! Gettin' drunk was all there was lef' fur us; and even in gettin' drunk there wasn't no real Christian comfort, 'cause of Jack's damn owlin' stares."

"I guess ef anybody stared steady at you fur better'n three months you'd want to kill him too. Anyway, that's how I felt about it; an' I told Jack yesterday--soon as he waked up in th' mornin', an' while he was plumb sober--that ef he didn't let up on it I'd go fur him sure. An' that fool up an' says it was me done th' starin', and I'd got to stop it or he'd cut out my damn heart--an' them was his very words. An' by noon yesterday he was drunker'n a Dutchman, an' was starin' harder'n ever. An' he kep' at it all along till sunset, an' when we come down into th' cabin to get supper he still was starin'; and after supper--when we mought 'a' been jest like two brothers a-gettin' drunk together on gin-an'-water--he stared wust of all."

"Nobody could 'a' stood it no longer--and up I gets an' goes fur him, keepin' my promise fair an' square. At fust we jest punched each other sort o' friendly with our fists, but after a while Jack give me a clip that roused my dander and I took my knife to him; an' then he took his knife to me. I don't remember jest all about it, but I know we licked away at each other all over th' cabin, an' then up through th' companion-way, an' then all over th' deck--me a-slicin' into him an' him a-slicin' into me all th' time. And at last he got this rippin' cut into me, an' jest then I give him a jab that made him yell like a stuck pig an' down he fell. I knowed he'd done fur me, but somehow I managed to work my way along th' deck an' to get down here to my bunk, where I knowed I'd die easier; an' then things was all black fur a while--ontil all of a sudden you comes along, and I sees you standin' in the door there, an' takes you fur Jack's ghost, an' gets scared th' wust kind. But he's not doin' no ghost racket, Jack ain't. I've settled him an' his damn owl starin'--and it's a good job I have. Gimme some more gin."

And then, having taken the drink that I gave him, he rolled over a little--so that he lay as I found him, with his face turned away from me--and for a good long while he did not speak a word.

XVI

I RID MYSELF OF TWO DEAD MEN

Only an hour before I had been longing for any sort of a live man to talk with and so break my loneliness; but having thus found a live man--who, to be sure, was close to being a dead one--I would have been almost ready to get rid of him by going back to my mast in the open sea. Indeed, as I stood there in the shadows beside that dying brute, and with the other brute lying dead on the deck above me, the feeling of dull horror that filled me is more than I can put into words.

I think that the underlying strong strain of my wretchedness was an intense pity for myself. In what the fellow had told me I saw clearly outlined a good deal of what must be my own fate in that vile solitude: which I perceived suddenly must be strewn everywhere with dead men lying unhidden, corrupting openly; since none there were to hide the dead from sight as we hide them in the living world. And I realized that until I myself should be a part of that indecent exhibition of human carcasses--which might not be for a long while, for I was a strong man and not likely to die soon--I should have to dwell in the midst of all that corruption; and always with the knowledge that sooner or later I must take my place in it, and lie with all those unhidden others wasting away slowly in the open light of day. I got so sick as these horrid thoughts pressed upon me that I turned to the table and poured out for myself a stiff drink of gin-and-water--being careful first to rinse the glass well--and I was glad that I thought of it, for it did me good.

My movement about the cabin roused up the dying fellow and he hailed me to give him some more gin. His voice was so thick that I knew that the drink already had fuddled him; and after he had swiped off what I gave him he began to talk again. But the liquor had taken such hold upon him that he called me "Jack," not recognizing me, and evidently fancying that I was his mate--the man whom he had killed.

At first he rambled on about the storm that had wrecked them; and then about their chance of falling in with a passing vessel; and then about some woman named Hannah who would be worrying about him because he did not come home. As well as I could make out he went over in this fashion most of what had happened--and it was little enough, in one way--from the time that the two found themselves alone upon the hulk until they began to get among the weed, and realized pretty well what that meant for them.

"It ain't no use now, Jack," he rambled on. "It ain't no use now thinkin' about gettin' home, an' Hannah may as well stop lookin' fur me. This is th' Dead Man's Sea we're gettin' into; an' I knows it well, an' you knows it well, both on us havin' heerd it talked about by sailor-men ever sence we come afloat as boys. Down in th' middle of it is all th' old dead wrecks that ever was sence ships begun sailin'; and all th' old dead sailor-men is there too. It's a orful place, Jack, that me an' you's goin' to--more damn orful, I reckon, than we can hev any idee. Gin's all thet's lef' to us, and it's good luck we hev such swashins of it aboard. Here's at you, Jack an' gimme some more out o' the kag, you damn starin' owl."

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, damn 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 scum of rottenness? I'd have you to know that cuttin' hearts out is a game two can play at. Take that, damn you! An' that! An' that! Them's fur your starin'--you damn 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: "Hell! 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 mass 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 lashing 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 passionate 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 compass it; for in the time that had passed 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 ships 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 pass by, though I saw well enough that pushing 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-ship 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 passage 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 ships 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 coarse 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 ship 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 appetite 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-ship--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 ships 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.