All this time they had been drinking undiluted gin like water; three bottles stood broached in different quarters; and none passed without a gulp.  Tommy collapsed against the mainmast; Wicks fell on his face on the poop ladder and moved no more; Amalu had vanished unobserved.  Carthew was the last afoot:  he stood swaying at the break of the poop, and the lantern, which he still carried, swung with his movement.  His head hummed; it swarmed with broken thoughts; memory of that day’s abominations flared up and died down within him like the light of a lamp in a strong draught.  And then he had a drunkard’s inspiration.

“There must be no more of this,” he thought, and stumbled once more below.

The absence of Holdorsen’s body brought him to a stand.  He stood and stared at the empty floor, and then remembered and smiled.  From the captain’s room he took the open case with one dozen and three bottles of gin, put the lantern inside, and walked precariously forth.  Mac was once more conscious, his eyes haggard, his face drawn with pain and flushed with fever; and Carthew remembered he had never been seen to, had lain there helpless, and was so to lie all night, injured, perhaps dying.  But it was now too late; reason had now fled from that silent ship.  If Carthew could get on deck again, it was as much as he could hope; and casting on the unfortunate a glance of pity, the tragic drunkard shouldered his way up the companion, dropped the case overboard, and fell in the scuppers helpless.

CHAPTER XXV.  A BAD BARGAIN.

With the first colour in the east, Carthew awoke and sat up.  A while he gazed at the scroll of the morning bank and the spars and hanging canvas of the brig, like a man who wakes in a strange bed, with a child’s simplicity of wonder.  He wondered above all what ailed him, what he had lost, what disfavour had been done him, which he knew he should resent, yet had forgotten.  And then, like a river bursting through a dam, the truth rolled on him its instantaneous volume:  his memory teemed with speech and pictures that he should never again forget; and he sprang to his feet, stood a moment hand to brow, and began to walk violently to and fro by the companion.  As he walked, he wrung his hands.  “God—­God—­God,” he kept saying, with no thought of prayer, uttering a mere voice of agony.

The time may have been long or short, it was perhaps minutes, perhaps only seconds, ere he awoke to find himself observed, and saw the captain sitting up and watching him over the break of the poop, a strange blindness as of fever in his eyes, a haggard knot of corrugations on his brow.  Cain saw himself in a mirror.  For a flash they looked upon each other, and then glanced guiltily aside; and Carthew fled from the eye of his accomplice, and stood leaning on the taffrail.