“One more step, Mr. Hands,” said I, “and I’ll blow your brains out!  Dead men don’t bite, you know,” I added with a chuckle.

He stopped instantly.  I could see by the working of his face that he was trying to think, and the process was so slow and laborious that, in my new-found security, I laughed aloud.  At last, with a swallow or two, he spoke, his face still wearing the same expression of extreme perplexity.  In order to speak he had to take the dagger from his mouth, but in all else he remained unmoved.

“Jim,” says he, “I reckon we’re fouled, you and me, and we’ll have to sign articles.  I’d have had you but for that there lurch, but I don’t have no luck, not I; and I reckon I’ll have to strike, which comes hard, you see, for a master mariner to a ship’s younker like you, Jim.”

I was drinking in his words and smiling away, as conceited as a cock upon a wall, when, all in a breath, back went his right hand over his shoulder.  Something sang like an arrow through the air; I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast.  In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment—­I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim—­both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands.  They did not fall alone; with a choked cry, the coxswain loosed his grasp upon the shrouds and plunged head first into the water.

27

“Pieces of Eight”

Owing to the cant of the vessel, the masts hung far out over the water, and from my perch on the cross-trees I had nothing below me but the surface of the bay.  Hands, who was not so far up, was in consequence nearer to the ship and fell between me and the bulwarks.  He rose once to the surface in a lather of foam and blood and then sank again for good.  As the water settled, I could see him lying huddled together on the clean, bright sand in the shadow of the vessel’s sides.  A fish or two whipped past his body.  Sometimes, by the quivering of the water, he appeared to move a little, as if he were trying to rise.  But he was dead enough, for all that, being both shot and drowned, and was food for fish in the very place where he had designed my slaughter.

I was no sooner certain of this than I began to feel sick, faint, and terrified.  The hot blood was running over my back and chest.  The dirk, where it had pinned my shoulder to the mast, seemed to burn like a hot iron; yet it was not so much these real sufferings that distressed me, for these, it seemed to me, I could bear without a murmur; it was the horror I had upon my mind of falling from the cross-trees into that still green water, beside the body of the coxswain.

I clung with both hands till my nails ached, and I shut my eyes as if to cover up the peril.  Gradually my mind came back again, my pulses quieted down to a more natural time, and I was once more in possession of myself.