My new employment struck Hands all of a heap;he began to see the dice going against him,and after an obvious hesitation,he also hauled himself heavily into the shrouds,and with the dirk in his teeth,began slowly and painfully to mount.It cost him no end of time and groans to haul his wounded leg behind him,and I had quietly finished my arrangements before he was much more than a third of the way up. Then, with a pistol in either hand, I addressed him.
“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.
XXVII “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.
It was my first thought to pluck forth the dirk,but either it stuck too hard or my nerve failed me,and I desisted with a violent shudder. Oddly enough,that very shudder did the business. The knife, in fact,had come the nearest in the world to missing me altogether;it held me by a mere pinch of skin,and this the shudder tore away.The blood ran down the faster, to be sure,but I was my own master again and only tacked to the mast by my coat and shirt.
These last I broke through with a sudden jerk,and then regained the deck by the starboard shrouds.For nothing in the world would I have again ventured,shaken as I was, upon the overhanging port shrouds from which Israel had so lately fallen.
I went below and did what I could for my wound;it pained me a good deal and still bled freely,but it was neither deep nor dangerous,nor did it greatly gall me when I used my arm.Then I looked around me, and as the ship was now,in a sense, my own,I began to think of clearing it from its last passenger--the dead man, O’Brien.
He had pitched, as I have said, against the bulwarks,where he lay like some horrible,ungainly sort of puppet, life-size, indeed,but how different from life’s colour or life’s comeliness!In that position I could easily have my way with him,and as the habit of tragical adventures had worn off almost all my terror for the dead, I took him by the waist as if he had been a sack of bran and with one good heave, tumbled him overboard. He went in with a sounding plunge; the red cap came off and remained floating on the surface; and as soon as the splash subsided, I could see him and Israel lying side by side, both wavering with the tremulous movement of the water. O’Brien, though still quite a young man, was very bald. There he lay, with that bald head across the knees of the man who had killed him and the quick fishes steering to and fro over both.
I was now alone upon the ship; the tide had just turned.The sun was within so few degrees of setting that already the shadow of the pines upon the western shore began to reach right across the anchorage and fall in patterns on the deck. The evening breeze had sprung up, and though it was well warded off by the hill with the two peaks upon the east, the cordage had begun to sing a little softly to itself and the idle sails to rattle to and fro.
I began to see a danger to the ship.The jibs I speedily doused and brought tumbling to the deck,but the main-sail was a harder matter. Of course,when the schooner canted over,the boom had swung out-board,and the cap of it and a foot or two of sail hung even under water.I thought this made it still more dangerous;yet the strain was so heavy that I half feared to meddle.At last I got my knife and cut the halyards.The peak dropped instantly,a great belly of loose canvas floated broad upon the water,and since, pull as I liked,I could not budge the downhall,that was the extent of what I could accomplish.For the rest, the HISPANIOLA must trust to luck, like myself.
By this time the whole anchorage had fallen into shadow--the last rays,I remember, falling through a glade of the wood and shining bright as jewels on the flowery mantle of the wreck. It began to be chill; the tide was rapidly fleeting seaward, the schooner settling more and more on her beam-ends.
I scrambled forward and looked over.It seemed shallow enough,and holding the cut hawser in both hands for a last security,I let myself drop softly overboard.The water scarcely reached my waist;the sand was firm and covered with ripple marks,and I waded ashore in great spirits,leaving the HISPANIOLA on her side,with her main-sail trailing wide upon the surface of the bay.About the same time,the sun went fairly down and the breeze whistled low in the dusk among the tossing pines.
At least, and at last, I was off the sea,nor had I returned thence empty-handed.There lay the schooner,clear at last from buccaneers and ready for our own men to board and get to sea again. I had nothing nearer my fancy than to get home to the stockade and boast of my achievements. Possibly I might be blamed a bit for my truantry, but the recapture of the HISPANIOLA was a clenching answer, and I hoped that even Captain Smollett would confess I had not lost my time.