 Chapter 9 of THE FANTOM DEATH AND OTHER STORIES In the year 1863, I sailed as ship's doctor aboard the Chilemon, in the third voyage that fine black wall liner made to Melbourne. I had obtained the berth through the influence of a relative. My own practice was a snug little concern in a town some fifty miles from London, but a change was needed—a change for my health. Such a change is nothing but the oceans of the world with their several climates and hundred winds could provide. And so I resolved to go on a voyage round the world on the easy terms of feeling pulses and administering drafts, with nothing to pay and nothing to receive—a seat at the cabin table—and a berth fitted with shelves and charged with a very powerful smell of chemists' shop down aft in what is called the steerage. I joined the ship at the East India Docks and went below to inspect my quarters. I found them gloomy and small, but any rat hole was reckoned good enough in those days for a ship's doctor. A person who, though of the first importance to the well-being of a ship, is, as a rule, treated by most owners and skippers, with the same sort of consideration that in former times a parson to a nobleman received, until he had obliged my lord by marrying his cast lady. First, let me briefly sketch this interior of saloon and steerage, since it is the theatre on which was enacted the extraordinary tragedy I am about to relate. The chilemen had a long poop. Under this was the saloon. In those days termed the cutty. Cabins, very richly bulkheaded, went a way down aft on either hand. Amidst ships was the table, overhead the skylights, and the deck was pierced by the shaft of the mizzard mast, superbly decorated with a piano forte secured to the deck just abaft it. There were no ladies saloons, smoking rooms, bathrooms, as in this age, though the ship was one of the handsomest of her class. If you sought retirement, you went to your cabin. If you desired a pipe, you stepped on deck. If you asked for a bath, you were directed to the head pump. The chilemen's cutty was entered from the quarterdeck, by doors close beside the two flights of steps which conducted to the poop. A large square of hatch yawned near the entrance inside, and you descended a staircase to the steerage where my birth was. The arrangement of this steerage resembled that of the cutty, but the bulkheads and general furniture were in the last degree plain. I believe they charged about twenty-five pounds for a birth down here, and sixty or seventy gitties for a cabin up above. Whilst I stood in my birth looking around me, a little bow-legged man in a camlet jacket and a large strawberry mark on his cheek peered in and asked if I was the doctor. I, Dr. Harris, said I, I'm the ship's steward, sir, said he. That's where I sleep, and he pointed to a cabin opposite. I was glad to make this man's acquaintance and was very civil to him. I would advise all sea-going doctors on long voyage sailing ships to speedily make friends with the head steward. I remarked upon the gloominess of my quarters, and said I was afraid when it came to my making-up drafts I might blunder for the want of light. He answered that the sailors never expected much more than strong doses of glober salts, and that in his experience passengers as a rule managed very well without physics until they got ashore again. I asked him if we were a full ship. He answered pretty full. About half the steerage berths were taken, and the same number of cabins would be occupied in the saloon. Between decks were crowded, he told me. After this chat I went on deck, where I made the acquaintance of the captain and the chief mate. The ship was still in the docks, and the captain had just come aboard, and was talking to the first officer when I walked up to them. The decks were full of life, and the scene charged with excitement and interest. Groups of tween-decks people stood about, and numbers of drunken sailors were bawling and cutting capers on the foxtail. Some saloon passengers who had joined the ship in the docks walked the poop. Blue Peter was streaming at our four-royal mast head under the gray sky of the Isle of Dogs. In all directions rose the masts of ships, a complicated forest, the wildering with the lacework and tracery of rigging. Cargo was swinging in and out. Paws of capstan and winch were ticking like gigantic clocks to the thrust of the hand-spike and the revolution of the handle. The air was full of the smell of distant climbs. I seemed to taste coffee and nutmeg and a pungent tickling of black pepper. The perfume of the greasy wool bale was dominant and suggested nothing of the sweetness of the Arabian gale. The captain went below, the mate fell a-shouting. I walked to the brass rail that ran across the break of the poop and gazed about me. The steerage passengers on the main deck looked a shabbily dressed lot of poor distressed people, men, women, and children. I took notice that certain young fellows, apprentices or midshipmen, with brass buttons on their jackets and brass badges on their caps, warned them off the quarter-deck whenever they stepped a-baffed the main mast. One of these young fellows came and stood beside me. He was a gentlemanly, fair-haired, handsome lad, now making, as he presently told me, his second voyage. I asked him why those poor people were ordered off the part of the deck that lay immediately beneath us. He said, because it was the quarter-deck, to be used only by the second-class passengers. That dirty rabble, said he, looking with disgust at the third-class folks, must keep to the waist and foxle if they want to air. And this fine deck of poop, said I? Nobody uses this, he answered, but the saloon knobs and the officers in the midshipmen of the ship. Shortly before eleven, the vessel hauled out of dock. There was much noise of yelling and swearing at this time. My sight and hearing were confounded, and I wondered that any mortal being should understand the exact thing to do in such a scene of clamorous distraction. People on the pier heads shrieked farewells to those on board, and those on board sobbed and yelped in response. When we had floated over the sill, with the mud-pilot on the foxle almost apoplectic, with unavailing wrath that some insult fired at him out of a hurricane lung on the wharf, a tug got hold of us, a couple of seamen lurched aft to the wheel, the hawse are tautened, and away we went down the river in the fizzing wake of a pair of churning paddles. The varied scenery of the Thames. I mean its maritime details of craft, of twenty different rigs and steamers, of twenty different aspects thrusting up and down, some staggering a thwart, others making a beeline through the reaches. Charmed and interested me, who was fresh from a long spell of inland, almost rural life. And I lingered till I was driven below by the wet which came sweeping along in a succession of drenching squalls as we rounded out of galleons into barking reach. I spent the remainder of that day in putting my cabin to rights, examining the drugs, some of which for antiquity my thought might have gone round the world with cook in his first voyage, and in providing for my own comfort as best I could, and at half-past six went into the cutty to join the people at dinner, by which hour the ship had arrived at a mooring boy off Gravesend, and was lying motionless on her own shadow in the stream. It was a sullen evening already dark and dirty blowing wet by their on-deck. The muffled howling and hissing of the wind in the three towering spires of mast and yard and rigging communicated, I've no doubt the particular brilliance and beauty I found in the appearance of the well-lighted cutty, with its long table draped for dinner, sparkling with glass and a plate, and a number of ladies and gentlemen, along with a captain and chief officer, issuing from their respective berths to take their seats. Thirteen of us sat down. And when this was remarked by an elderly lady next to the captain, a midshipman was sent for to neutralize the sinister influence of that number by making a fourteenth. The lad took his place with the countenance of happy astonishment. He heartily wished, I dare say, that thirteen people would sit down to dinner every day. I understood that there were some eight or ten more passengers expected from Gravesend in the morning. I looked about me to see what sort of persons I was to be associated with on an ocean passage that might run into four months. No need in this brief record of a tragic event to enter into minute descriptions of the people. Enough if I refer now to two persons who sat opposite me, both of whom were to prove leading actors in what I have to tell. One of them was a man of about six and 30 years of age. He wore a heavy mustache, slightly streaked with gray. His eyes were dark, keen, and steadfast in their gaze. Steadfast indeed to rudeness, for his manner of looking at you was scarcely less than a deliberate scrutinizing stare. His hair was thin on the top, bushy at the sides, his complexion dark as of one who has lived long under the sun. His voice was subdued, his whole bearing well bred. His companion was a lady, a dark, very handsome woman of three or four and twenty. Her hair was black, without gloss, a soft, dark, rich black, and I never before saw a woman with so wonderful a thickness of hair as that girl had. Her large, fine, dark eyes had a tropic sparkle. There was foreign blood in the glances which flashed through the long lashes. Her complexion was a most delicate olive made tender by a soft, lasting bloom, which rested like a lingering blush upon her cheeks. Her figure looked faultless and doubtless was so. I put the man down as a happy fellow, carrying a beautiful bride away with him to the antipodes. You could not have doubted that they were newly married. His behavior was all fondness, hers that of the impassioned young wife, who finds difficulty in concealing her adoration in public. I have thus sketched them, but I own that I was not more particularly interested in the couple than in others of the people who sat on either hand. The chief mate of the ship, however, Mr. Small, who occupied a seat on my left, concluded that my interest was sufficiently keen to justify him in talking to me about them. And in a low voice, he told me that they were captain and Mrs. Norton Savage. He didn't quite know what he was captain of, but he had gathered from some source he couldn't recollect that he had made a fortune in South America, in Lima, or Cayao, and had been married a few weeks only and was going to live in Australia as his wife's health was not good. And the doctors believed the Australian climate would suit her. Early next morning, the rest of the passengers came on board. The tug again took us in tow. And under a dark blue sky, mountainous with masses of white cloud, the chilliman floated in tow of the tug into channel waters, where a long flowing heave dispatched a great number of us to our cabins. We met with nothing but headwinds and chopping seas down channel. The ship lurched and sprang consumedly, and the straining noises of bulkheads and strong fastenings were so swift and furious in that part of the vessel where I slept that I'd sometimes think the fabric was going to pieces at my end of her. I was very seasick, but happily my services were never required in that time. I think we were five days in beating clear of the channel. The weather then changed. The sky brightened into a clear azure, delicately shaded by clouds. A soft wind blew out of the west, and when I made my first appearance on deck, I found the ship clothed in swelling canvas from truck to waterway. Her sand-white decks were lively with people in motion and the swaying shadows of the rigging. A number of ladies and gentlemen walked the poop, and the captain, with a telescope at his eye, was looking at a small steamer that was passing us at about a mile with a color flying. Captain and Mrs. Norton Savage stood beside him, also looking at the steamer. The foam spun along the ship's side in wool-white wreaths, and every bubble shone like a bit of rainbow, and the streak of the vessel's wake gleamed upon the flowing lines of the ocean astern as though she trailed a length of mother-of-pearl. All sights and sounds were beautiful and refreshing. I breathed deep, with exquisite enjoyment of the ocean air after my spell of confinement in my apothecary shop of a cabin, and with growing admiration of the spectacle of the noble ship, slightly healing from the breeze and curtsying stately as she went, till you'd think she kept time to some solemn music rising up round about her from the deep and audible to her only, such a harkening look as she took from the yearning lift of her jibs and stay sails. Presently the captain observed me, called me to him, and we stood in conversation for some twenty minutes. I begged his leave to take a look round the ship, and he ordered a midshipman to accompany me. I peeped into the galley or ship's kitchen, then into the foxhole, a gloomy cave dully lighted by a lamp whose vapor was poisonous with the slush that fed it, and complicated to the landlubber's eye by the glimmering outlines of hammocks and the dark coffin-like shapes of bunks and seamen's chests. I then descended into the tween decks by way of the main hatch, and took a view of the accommodation there, and found the cabins formed of planks, roughly shaped into bulkheads with partitions which made mere pigeonholes of the places. In truth the poor third-class folk were always badly treated in those days at sea. They were ill-housed, they were half-starved, they were elbowed, sworn at, and generally tyrannized over by all hands from the captain to the cook's mate, and in heavy weather, when the hatches were batten down, they were almost suffocated. Yet they were better off than the sailors, who were not only equally half-starved, half-suffocated, and sworn at, but were forced to do the treadmill work of the ship also. I regained the deck, glad to get out of this gloomy region of crying babies and quarreling children, and grimy groups and corners shuffling greasy cards, and women with shawls over their heads mixing flour and water for a pudding, or conversing shrilly in provincial accents, some looking very white indeed, and all as though it was quite time they changed their country. As I went along the quarter-deck on my way to the cutty, I saw a young man standing in the recess formed by the projection of the foremost cutty cabins and the overhanging ledge or break of the poop. I looked at him with some attention. He was a particularly handsome young fellow, chiefly remarkable for the contrast between the lifeless pallor of his face and the vitality of his large, bright, dark eyes. His hair was cropped close in military fashion. He wore a cloth cap with a navel peak. His dress was a large, loose monkey jacket, and blue cloth trousers cut in the flowing nautical style. On the beach of South Sea, or the sands of Ramsgate, he might have passed for a yachtsman. On the high seas and on the deck of a full-rigged ship with plenty of hairy sailors about to compare him with, nothing mortal could have looked less nautical. I paused when in the cutty to glance at him again through the window. He leaned in the corner of the recess with his arms clasped upon his breast and his fine and sparkling eyes fixed upon the blue line of the horizon that was visible above the lee-ballwork rail. My gaze had lighted upon many faces whilst I looked over the ship, but odd none had it lingered. It lingered now, and I wondered who the youth was. His age might have been 20. Handsome he was, as I have said. But his expression was hard, almost fierce, and certainly repellent. Whilst I watched him, his lips twitched, awry, three or four times, and exposed a grin of flashing white teeth that was anything but mirthful, I can assure you. His clothes were good, his appearance refined, and I concluded that he was one of the cutty passengers who had come on board at Gravesend. He turned his face and saw me looking, and instantly made a step which carried him out of sight past the cabin projection. The steward came up out of the steerage at that moment, and wishing to know who was who in the ship, I asked him to peep through the door and tell me who the melancholy, pale-faced young gentleman in the nautical clothes was. He popped his head out and then said, He's a young gent named John Burgess, one of the steerage people. He occupies the foremost cabin to starboard beside the foot of them steps, said he, pointing to the catch. Is he alone in the ship, said I? All alone, sir. Where do those steerage people take their meals? Why, in the steerage, at the table that's up short abreast of your cabin? Nothing in any way memorable happened for a considerable time. The ship drove through the Atlantic, impelled by strong beam and quartering winds, which sometimes blew with the weight of half a gale, and veiled her foxle with glittering lifts of foam, and healed her till her lee channels ripped through the seas in flashing spheres as the white water which leaps from the strokes of the thrashers' flails. The passengers had settled down to the routine of shipboard life. They played the piano. They sang. They hoved the decoy. They formed themselves into wist parties. Both Captain Norton Savage and his wife promised to become exceedingly popular with all the people who lived aft. The lady sang sweetly. She sang Spanish, English, and French songs. It was understood that she was a South American, of pure Spanish blood on one side. Captain Norton Savage told a good story. He smoked excellent cigars, and was liberal with them. He came to me one day and talked about his wife, told me there was consumption in her family, and asked what I thought of a sea voyage for her, and of the climate of Australia. I could find nothing to object to in the man, except his stare. There was something defiant in his manner of looking at you. Which was significant with it, even when nothing more was meant than met the ear. I was misled at first, and sometimes troubled myself to look under his words for his mind. Then I found out that it was his stare which was responsible for what his language seemed to carry. And so, with the rest of us, took him as he offered himself. And still, I never felt quite easy with him, though no man laughed louder at his humorous stories. I was going one morning from my birth to the cutty when, at the foot of the steps which conducted to the hatch, I met the young man called John Burgess. I had seen nothing of him for days. He came out of his cabin holding his cap. Plenty of light flowed through the hatch. He was very pale, and I thought seemed ill, and his eyes had a wild look. He was handsome, as I have said, at least to my way of thinking, but there was an evil spirit in the delicate structure and lineaments of his face. I said, good morning. He answered, good morning, in a low voice, but with a manner of impatience, as though he wished me to pass on or get out of his road. Are you going to Australia for your health, said I, for the sake of saying something? No, he answered. Are you English? Pray, who are you? He exclaimed with a foreign accent. I am Dr. Harris, I answered, smiling. He looked uneasy on my pronouncing the word doctor, stepped back, and grasped the handle of his cabin door, yet paused to say, are you a passenger, sir? I am the ship's doctor, I answered. Without another word, he entered his cabin and shut the door upon himself. His behavior was so abrupt, discourteous, that I suspected his brain was at fault. Indeed, I made up my mind in the interests of the passengers and for the security of the ship to keep my eye upon him, that is, by accosting him from time to time, and by watching him without seeming to watch whenever we should happen to be on deck together. And yet I was not altogether satisfied with my suspicion of his not being right-headed, either. I found my puzzlement going another way, but in a direction that I could by no means make clear to myself. However, not to refine upon this matter, I think it was next day that, happening to come along from the foxhole where I had been visiting a sick sailor, I spied the young fellow standing before the maid-mast in a sort of peeping posture. His eyes were directed aft. He was watching the people walking on the poop. I stopped to look at him, struck by his attitude. The great body of the mast effectually concealed him from all observers aft. He turned his head and saw me. His face was ghastly white, the expression wonderful for the tragic wrath of it. On meeting my eyes he colored up. I never could have credited so swift a transformation of hue. His blush was deep and dark, and his eyes shone like fire. He scowled angrily, stepped round the mast, and disappeared through the cutty door. After this I saw no more of him for a week. I questioned the steward who told me the youth was keeping his cabin. What's his name again, said I? John Burgess, sir. That's an English name, but he's not an Englishman, said I. We don't trouble ourselves about names on board ships, sir, he answered. There'd be purses' names aft as well as fard. Does he ever talk to you? No, sir, he might be a funeral mute for talk. Does he come to the table for his meals? No, sir, his grubs carried into him. When did you see him last? About an hour ago. Does he seem well? Well as I am, sir. I asked no more questions. There was a cheerfulness in the steward's way of answering, which promised me he saw nothing peculiar in the lad. This was reassuring, for I knew he was often in and out of the young man's berth. And anything eccentric in his contact would strike him. As for me, it was no part of my duty to intrude upon the passengers in their privacy. We took the northeast trade wind, made noble progress down the North Atlantic, lost the commercial gale in eight or 10 degrees north of the equator, and then lay humbugging, as the foxel saying is, on plains of greasy blue water, scarcely crisped by the cat's paw, and often four hours at a time, without air enough to wag the fly of the vein at the masthead. One very hot night, after a day of roasting calm, I lingered on the poop for some while after my customary hour of retiring to rest, for the refreshment of the do-cooled atmosphere and the cold breath lifting off the black surface of ocean. The awning was spread over the poop. A few shadowy figures moved slowly under it. Here and there a red star indicated a smoker sucking at a cigar. The water alongside was full of smoky fire, rolling in dim green bursts of cloud from the bends of the ship as she leaned with a swell. But the stars were few and faint. Down in the southwest was a little play of silent lightning. The noises of the night were rare and weak. Scarce more than the flap of some pinion of cloth up in the gloom, or the jerk of a wheel chain, or the subdued moan of water washing under the counter. I smoked out my pipe and still lingered. It was very hot. And I did not love the fancy of my bunk on such a night. The passengers went below one by one after the cabin lamps were turned down. Six bells were struck, 11 o'clock. I took a few turns with the officer of the watch, then went on to the quarter-deck, where I found Captain Norton Savage smoking and chatting with two or three of the passengers under the little clock against the cutting front. The captain offered me a cigar, our companions presently withdrew, and we were left alone. I observed a note of excitement in Captain Savage's speech, and guessed that the heat had coaxed him into draining more seltzer and brandy than was good for him. We were together till half past 11. His talk was mainly anecdotic. And wholly concerned others. I asked him how his wife bore the heat. He answered very well, he thought. Did I not think the voyage was doing her good? I answered I had observed her at dinner that day, and thought she looked very well in spite of her pallor. These were the last words I spoke before wishing him good night. He threw the end of his cigar overboard and went to his cabin, which was situated on the portside just over against the hatch, down which I went to my quarters in the steerage. All was silent in this part. The hush upon the deep worked in the ship like a spirit. At long intervals only arose the faint sounds of cargo lightly strained in the hold. Much time passed before I slept. Through the open port hole over my bunk I could hear the mellow chimes of the ship's bell as it was struck. It was as though the land lay close aboard, with the church-clock chiming. The hot atmosphere was rendered doubly disgusting by the smell of the drugs. Yay, more than drugs, we thought, went to the combined flavor. I seemed to sniff bilge water and the odor of the cockroach. I was awakened by a hand upon my shoulder. Rows up for God's sake, doctor. There's a man stabbed in the cutty. I instantly got my wits and threw my legs over the edge of the bunk. What's this about a man stabbed, I exclaimed, pulling on my clothes? The person who had called me was the second mate, Mr. Story. He told me that he was officer of the watch. A few minutes since, one of the passengers who slept next to the berth occupied by the savages was awakened by a shriek. He ran into the cutty, and at that moment Mrs. Savage put her head out and said that her husband lay dead with a knife buried in his heart. The passenger rushed on deck, and Mr. Story came to fetch me before arousing the captain. I found several people in the cutty. The shriek of the wife had awakened others besides the passenger who had raised the alarm. Captain Smallport, the commander of the ship, hastily ran out of his cabin as I passed through the steerage hatch. Somewhat had turned the cabin lamp full on, and the light was abundant. The captain came to me, and I stepped at once to the savage's berth and entered it. There was no light here, and the cutty lamp threw no illumination into this cabin. I called for a box of matches, and lighted the bracket lamp, and then there was revealed this picture. In the upper bunk, clothed in a sleeping costume of pajamas and light-jacket, lay the figure of Captain Norton Savage, with a cross-shaped hilt of a dagger standing up out of his breast over the heart, and a dark stain of blood showing under it like its shadow. In the right-hand corner, beside the door, stood Mrs. Savage in her night-dress. Her face was of the whiteness of her bed-gown, her black eyes looked double their usual size. I noticed blood upon her right hand, and a stain of blood upon her night-dress over the right hip. All this was the impression of a swift glance. In a step I was at Captain Savage's side and found him dead. Here is murder, Captain, said I, turning to the commander of the ship. He closed the door to shut out the prying passengers, and exclaimed, Is he dead? Yes. Mrs. Savage shrieked. I observed her dressing-gown hanging beside the door, and put it on her, again noticing the blood stains upon her hands and night-dress. She looked horribly frightened, and trembled violently. What can you tell us about this, said Captain Smallport? In her foreign accent, strongly defined by the passion of terror or grief, she answered, but in such broken, tremulous, hysteric sentences as I should be unable to communicate in writing, that being suddenly awakened by a noise, as of her cabin door opened or shut, she called to Captain Savage, but received no answer. She called again, then, not knowing whether he had yet come to bed, and the cabin being in darkness, she got out of her bunk and felt over the upper one for him. Her hand touched the hilt of the dagger. She shook him and called his name, touched the dagger again, then uttered the shriek that had alarmed the ship. Is it suicide, said the Captain, turning to me? I looked at the body, at the posture of the hands, and answered, emphatically, no. I found terror rather than grief in Mrs. Savage's manner. Whenever she directed her eyes at the corpse, I noticed the straining of panic fear in them. The Captain opened the cabin door and called for the stewardess. She was in waiting outside, as you may believe. The cutty, indeed, was full of people, and whilst the door was open, I heard the grumbling hum of the voices of tween-deck passengers and seamen crowding at the cutty front. The news had spread that one of the first class passengers had been murdered, and every tongue was asking, who had done it? Stewardess took Mrs. Savage to a spare cabin. When the women were gone and the door again shut, Captain Smallport still remaining with me. I drew the dagger out of the breast of the body and took it to the light. It was more properly a dagger-shaped knife than a dagger, the point sharp as a needle, the edge razor-like. The handle was of fretted ivory. To it was a fixed, a thin slip of silver plate, on which was engraved Charles Winthrop sharing him to Leonora Dunbar. Is it the wife's doing, do you think? said the Captain, looking at the dagger. I would not say yes or no to that question yet, said I. She might have done it in her sleep. Look at his hands, said I. He did not stab himself. Will you take charge of this dagger, Captain? Oh, bloody like that, cried he, recoiling. I cleansed it, and then he took it. We stood conversing awhile. I examined the body again, which, done, the pair of us went out, first extinguishing the lamp, and then locking the door. The passengers sat up for the remainder of the night, and the ship was as full of life as though the sun had risen. In every corner of the vessel there was a hum of talk, in the subdued note into which the horror of murder depresses the voice. The Captain called his chief officer and myself to his cabin. We inspected the dagger afresh and talked the dreadful thing over. Who was the assassin? Both the Captain and mate cried, who but the wife? I said I could not be satisfied of that yet. Who was Charles Winthrop sharing him? Who was Leonora Dunbar? It was some comfort, anyhow, to feel that whoever the wretch might be, he or she was in the ship. There were no doors to rush through, no windows to leap from, no country to scour here. The assassin was a prisoner with us all in the ship. Our business was to find out who of the whole crowd of us had murdered the man, and we had many weeks before us. In the small hours the sailmaker and his mates stitched up the body, ready for the toss over the side before noon. We waited until the sun had arisen. Then, our resolution having been formed, the Captain and I entered the berth, which had been occupied by the savages and examined such baggage as we found there. The keys were in a bag. Our search lasted an hour. At the expiration of the hour, we had found out mainly through the agency of a large bundle of letters, but in part also through other direct proofs that the name of the murdered man was Charles Winthrop sharing him, the name of the lady whom we had known as Mrs. Savage was Leonora Dunbar, that this Miss Dunbar had been an intimate friend of Mrs. Sharingham, and that the husband had eloped with her and taken a passage from Melbourne in the ship Chiliman, promising marriage in 20 solemn protestations on their arrival in Australia. The ceremony to be repeated should Mrs. Sharingham die. This story we got together out of the letters and other conclusive evidence. The Captain was now rootedly of opinion that Miss Dunbar had killed Sharingham. It's not only the dagger, said he, with her name on it, which was therefore hers, and in her keeping when the murder was done, for suppose someone else, the assassin, are you to believe that he entered the savage's berth and rummaged for this particular weapon instead of using a knife of his own? How would he know of the dagger or where to find it? It's not the dagger only. There's the stains on her hand and bedgown. And mightn't she have killed him in a fit of madness owing to remorse and thoughts of a lifelong banishment from England and horror of the disgrace and shame he's brought her to? I listened in silence, but not yet could I make up my mind. I met the stewardess coming to the captain with the key of the savage's cabin. She wanted clothes for the lady. I asked how Mrs. Savage did, giving the unhappy woman the name she was known by on board. She won't speak, sir, answered the stewardess. She's fallen into a stony silence. She sits with her hands clasped and her eyes cast down, and I can't get a word out of her. I'll look in upon her by and by, said I. The body was buried at 10 o'clock in the morning. The captain read the funeral service, and the quarterdeck was crowded with the passengers and crew. I don't think there was the least doubt throughout the whole body of the people that Mrs. Savage, as they supposed her, had murdered sharing him. It was the murder that put into this funeral service the wild, tragic significance everybody seemed to find in it, to judge at least by the looks on the face as I glanced at. When the ceremony was ended, I called for the stewardess and went with her to Miss Dunbar's cabin. On entering I requested the stewardess to leave me. The lady was seated and did not lift her eyes nor exhibit any signs of life whilst I stood looking. Her complexion had turned into a dull pale yellow, and her face, with its expression of hard, almost blank repose, might have passed for marble, wantonly tincture to dim primrose. She had exchanged her dressing gown for a robe and appeared, attired as usual. I asked some questions, but got no answer. I then took a seat by her side and called her by the name of Leonora Dunbar. She now looked at me steadily, but I did not remark any expression of strong surprise, of the alarm and amazement I had supposed the utterance of that name would excite. I said softly, the captain and I have discovered who you are, and your relation with Charles Winthrop sharing him. Was it you who stabbed him? Tell me if you did it. Your sufferings will be the lighter when you have eased your conscience of the weight of this dreadful secret. It is hard to interpret the expression of the eyes if the rest of the features do not help. I seemed to find a look of hate and contempt in hers. Her face continued marble-hard, not being able to coax a syllable out of her, though I spared nothing of professional patience in the attempt. I left the cabin and, calling the stewardess, at her sea that the lady was kept without means to do herself a mischief. That day and the next passed. Miss Dunbar continued, dumb as a corpse. I visited her several times, and twice Captain Smallport accompanied me, but never a word would she utter. Nay, she would not even lift her eyes to look at us. I told the captain that it might be mere mules-ishness or a condition of mind that would end in madness. It was impossible to say. The stewardess said she ate and drank and went obediently to bed when ordered. She was as passive as a broken-spirited child, she said. For her part, she didn't believe the lady had killed the poor man. It was on the fourth day following the murder that the glass fell. It blackened in the northwest and came on to blow a hard gale of wind. A mountainous sea was running in a few hours upon which the ship made furious weather, clothed in flying brine to her tops, under no other canvas than a small-store main tri-sale. The hatches were batten down. The decks were full of water, which flashed in clouds of glittering smoke over the lee bulwark rail. The passengers, for the most part, kept their cabins. The cook could do no cooking. Indeed, the galley-fire was washed out, and we appeased our appetites with biscuit and tinned meat. The gale broke at nine o'clock on the following morning, leaving a wild, confused sea and a scowling sky all around the horizon with ugly yellow breaks over our reeling mast-heads. I was in my gloomy quarters, whose atmosphere was little more than a green twilight with the wash of the emerald brine swelling and thunder over the porthole. When the steward arrived to tell me that one of the passengers had met with a serious accident, I asked no questions, but instantly followed him along the steerage corridor into the cutty, where I found a group of the saloon people standing beside the figure of the young fellow named John Burgess, who lay at his length upon the deck. I had not set eyes on him for days and days. I thought at first he was dead. His eyes were half-closed. The glare of approaching dissolution was in the visible part of the pupils, and at first I felt no pulse. Two or three of the sailors who had brought him into the cutty stood in the doorway. They told me that the young fellow had persisted in mounting the foxhole ladder to windward. He was hailed to come down as the ship was pitching heavily and often dishing bodies of green water over her boughs. He took no notice of the men's cries and had gained the foxhole deck when an unusually heavy lurch flung him. He fell from a height of eight or nine feet, which might have broken a limb for him only unhappily. He struck the windless end and lay seemingly lifeless. I bade them lift and carry him to the cabin that I might examine him. And when they had placed him in his bunk, I told them to send the steward to help me and went to work to partially unclothe the lad, the judge of his injuries. Upon opening his coat, I discovered that he was a woman. On the arrival of the steward, I told him that the young fellow called John Burgess was a girl, and I requested him to send the stewardess. And whilst I waited for her, I carefully examined the unconscious sufferer and judged that she had received mortal internal injuries. All the while that I was thus employed, some extraordinary thoughts ran in my head. The stewardess came. I gave certain directions and went to the captain to report the matter. He was in no way surprised to learn that a woman dressed as a man was aboard his ship. Twice he told me had that sort of passenger sailed with him within the last four years. Captain, said I, I'll tell you what's in my head. That woman below who styled herself John Burgess murdered sharing him. Why do you think that? Because I believe that she's his wife. Ha! said Captain Smallport. I gave several reasons for this notion. What I observed in the disguised woman's behavior when hidden behind the main mast, then her being a foreigner in all probability a South American as Leonora Dunbar was, and so on. He said, what about the blood on Miss Dunbar's hand and nightdress? She told us she had felt over the body. Yes, yes, he cried. Doctor, you see things more clearly than I do. When I had conversed for some time with Captain Smallport, I walked to Miss Dunbar's cabin, knocked and entered. I found her on this occasion standing with her back to the door, apparently gazing at the sea through the portholes. She did not turn her head. I stood beside her to see her face and said, I have made a discovery. Mrs. Sharingham is on board the ship. Upon my pronouncing these words, she screamed and looked at me with a face in which I clearly read that her silence had been sheer, sullen, mulesh obstinacy with nothing of insanity in it, pure stubborn determination to keep silence that we might think what we chose. Mrs. Sharingham, in the ship, she cried. With starting eyes and the wildest, whitest countenance you can imagine. Yes, I answered. Then it's she who murdered Sharingham. She is capable of it, she is a Tigris. She cried in a voice pitched to the note of a scream. That's what I have come to talk to you about and I am glad you have found your voice. Where is she? she asked and a strong shudder ran through her. She is in her cabin below, dying. She may be dead even now as we converse. She uttered something in Spanish passionately and clasped her hands. Now hear me, said I, since you have your ears and have found your tongue. You are suspected of having murdered the man you eloped with. It is false, she cried. I loved him, oh, I loved him. She caught her breath and wept bitterly. In my own heart, said I, touched by her dreadful misery, I believe you guiltless. I am sure you are so, now that we have discovered that Mrs. Sharingham is on board. Will you answer a question? Yes, she sobbed. You know that Sharingham was stabbed to the heart with a dagger? Yes. It bears this inscription, Charles Winthrop Sharingham, to Leonora Dunbar. Was that dagger in your possession, in this ship? No, Mr. Sharingham gave it to me. There was no such inscription as you name upon it. I left it behind when I came away. I swear before my God, I speak the truth. Her voice was broken with sobs. She spoke with deepest agitation. Her manner convinced me it was as she represented. I said, come with me and see the woman and tell me if she is Mrs. Sharingham. She shrank and cried out that she could not go. She was perfectly sane. All her stubbornness was gone from her. She was now a miserable, scared, broken-hearted woman. I told her that the person I took to be Mrs. Sharingham lay insensible, and perhaps dead at this moment. And by putting on an air of command, I succeeded at last in inducing or rather obliging her to accompany me. She veiled herself before quitting the cabin. The saloon was empty. We passed into the steerage, and she followed me into the cabin where the woman was. The poor creature was still unconscious. The stewardess stood beside the bunk looking at its dying white occupant. I said to Miss Dunbar, is it Mrs. Sharingham? She was cowering at the door. But when she perceived that the woman lay without motion, with her eyes half closed, insensible, and perhaps dead, as she might suppose, she drew near the bunk, peered breathlessly. And then, looking around to me, said, she is Mrs. Sharingham. Let me go! I opened the door, and she fled with a strange noise of sobbing. I stayed for nearly three hours in Mrs. Sharingham's birth. There was nothing to be done for her. She passed away in her unconsciousness, and afterwards, when I looked more closely into the nature of her injuries, I wondered that she could have lived five minutes after the terrible fall that had beaten sensibility out of her over the windless end. I went to the captain to report her death, and in a long talk gave him my views of the tragic business. I said there could be no question that Mrs. Sharingham had followed the guilty couple to see with the determination so to murder her husband as to fix the crime of his death upon his paramour. How was this to be done? Her discovery at her home of the dagger her husband had given to Leonora Dunbar would perhaps give her the idea she needed. If Miss Dunbar spoke the truth then, indeed I could not account for the inscription on the dagger, but there could be no question whatever that Mrs. Sharingham had been her husband's murderous. This was my theory, and it was afterwards verified, up to the hilt. On the arrival of the chillamen at Melbourne, Miss Dunbar was sent home to take her trial for the murder of Mr. Sharingham. But her innocence was established by, first, the circumstance of a woman having been found aboard dressed as a man. Next, by the statement of witnesses that a woman whose appearance exactly corresponded with that of John Burgess had been the rounds of the shipping offices to inspect the list of passengers by vessels bound to Australia. Thirdly, by letters written to Leonora Dunbar by Sharingham found among Mrs. Sharingham's effects, in one of which the man told the girl that he proposed to carry her to Australia. Finally, and this was the most conclusive item in the whole catalog of evidence, an engraver's swore that a woman answering to Mrs. Sharingham's description called upon him with the dagger, produced in court, and requested him without delay to inscribe upon the thin plate Charles Winthrop Sharingham to Leonora Dunbar. And yet, but for the death of Mrs. Sharingham and my discovery of her sex, it was far more likely than not that the wife would have achieved her aim by killing her husband and getting her rival hanged for murder. End of Chapter 9. Recording by David McKay. Chapter 10 of The Phantom Death and Other Stories. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by James K. White, Chula Vista. The Phantom Death and Other Stories by William Clark Russell. The Secret of the Dead Mate. Black in the wake of the moon, in the heart of the trembling spread of white splendor, floated a boat. The night was breathless. Beyond the verge of the eclipsing brightness of the moon, the sky was full of stars. A man sat in the stern sheets of the boat, motionless with his chin on his breast and his arms in lifeless posture beside him. From time to time, he groaned. And after he had been sitting as though dead for an hour, he raised his head and lifted up his eyes to the moon and cursed the thirst that was burning his throat. Then shifted his figure close to the gunnel, over which he lay, with both hands in the water for the chill of it. The moonshine was nigh as bright as day. The sea-line ran firm as a sweep of painted circle through the silver mist in the far recesses. An oar was stepped as a mast in the boat and a thwarted was lashed another oar from which hung a man's shirt and coat. She looked dry as a midsummer ditch in that piercing moonlight. At the feet of the man distinctly visible were two or three little pellets or lumps of rag which he had been chewing throughout the day. But his jaws were now locked. The saliva had run dry. His sailor's teeth, blunted by junk and ship's bread, could bite no more moisture out of the fragment of stuff he had cut off his back. Oh, it is dreadful to suffer the agony of thirst. The froth, the baked and cracking lip, the strangled throat whilst beholding a vast breast of cold sea glazed into the beauty of ice by the moon and whilst hearing the fountain-like murmur and refreshing ripple of water alongside. The moon rolled slowly into the southwest, trailing her bright wake with her and the boat and its solitary occupant floated into the shadow. Again the man lifted his head and looked around him. A soft breeze but hot as the human breath was blowing and the shirt and coat dangling from the athwart ship ore were lifting to the light pressure. The man saw that the boat was moving over the sea but made no attempt to help her with the helm. Once more he cast his eyes up at the moon and cursed the thirst that was choking him. But a boat, like a ship, has a life and a spirit of her own. The little fabric ran as though with the sentience of a living organism. She knew there was something to hope for in the darkness ahead. Her wake was a short arrow-like line and it streamed from her in emerald bubbles and circling wreaths of fire. The sun rose and the shadow of the earth rolled off the sea which was feathering into the southwest to the steady pouring of the northeast wind. The boat ran straight and now the day being come when the man looked up and ahead he saw the shadow of land over the boughs. Life sprang up in him with the sight and a grin of hope twisted his face. With a husky groan he shifted himself for a grasp of the helm and laying his trembling hand upon the tiller he held the boat, but not more steadily than she had been going, for the land. He was a man of about 45 years of age. Half his clothes were aloft and he was attired in fear not trousers but the boatman's pattern and a waistcoat buttoned over his vest. Suffering had sifted a pallor into the sun-brown of his skin and his face was ghastly with famine and thirst. His short yellow beard stood straight out. His yellow hair was mixed with gray and lay clotted with the sweat of pain into long streaks over his brow and ears covering his eyes as though he was too weak or heedless to clear his vision. The speed of the boat quickly raised the land and by noon under the roasting sun it lay within a mile. It was one of the Bahama Cays, a flat island with a low hill in the midst of it, to the right of which was a green wood. The rest of the island was green with some sort of tropic growth as of guinea grass. The breeze was now very light. The sun had eaten it up, as the Spaniards say. The man thought he saw the sparkle of a waterfall and the sight made him mad and as strong in that hour as in his hardiest time. He sprang from his seat, pulled down his queer fabric of ore and flapping shirt and coat and flinging the two blades over, bent his back and drove the boat along. In a quarter of an hour her forefoot grounded on a coral-white beach that swept round a point clear of the foam of the breaker and the man reeling out of her onto the shore grasped her painter and secured it to an ore which he jammed into a thickness of some sort of bush that grew close to the wash of the water and then, rocking and stumbling, he went up the beach. It was an uninhabited island and nothing was in sight upon the whole circle of the white shining sea, saving the dim blue haze of land in the north and a like film or delicate discoloration of the atmosphere in the southwest. The man with rounded back and hanging arms and staggering gait searched for water. The heat was frightful. The sunshine blazed in the white sand and seemed to strike upwards into the face in darting and tingling needles, white-hot. He went towards the wood, wading painfully on his trembling legs, through the guinea-grass and thick undergrowth with toadstools in it, like red shields and aster with armored creatures, finger-long reptiles of glorious hue and spiders like bunches of jewels. Suddenly he stopped. His ears had caught a distant noise of water. He turned his back upon the sun and thrusting onwards came presently to a little stream in which the grass stood thick, green and sweet. He fell on his knees and putting his lips to the crystal surface, sucked up the water like a horse. Till being full nearly to bursting, he fell back with a moan of gratitude, his face hidden in his hands. He sat till the broiling sunshine forced him to rise. The slender stream narrowed in the direction of the wood and he walked beside it. Presently, after pushing a little way into the green shade, he found the source in a rock rich with verter and enameled with many strange and beautiful flowers. The trees in this wood stood well apart but their branches mingled in many places and the shade they made was nearly continuous. He threw himself down beside the source of the little stream to rest himself. The surf seethed with a noise of boiling through the silent blazing atmosphere outside. The miserable castaway now directed his eyes round in search of food. He saw several kinds of berries and things like apples but durced not eat of them for fear of being poisoned. Being now rested and immeasurably refreshed, he cooled his head in the stream and walked to the beach and picked up a number of crabs. He saw to his boat hauling her almost high and dry. All that she contained, besides the clothes which had served him for a sale, was a carpenter's hammer and a bag of spikes. He whipped off his waistcoat and put his coat on and dropping the hammer into his pocket returned to the wood with his collection of crabs. Then with his knife, he cut down a quantity of dry brushwood and set fire to it with the old fashioned tinder box that semen of this man's raiding sometimes carried in those days to light their pipes. He roasted the crabs artfully as one who has served in apprenticeship to hardship and having eaten, he drank again and then folded his arms to consider what he should do. He knew that the island was one of the Bahama Cays though which he could not imagine but other islands were in sight. He guessed that new Providence was not out of reach of his boat nor was the Florida coast remote and then there was all the traffic of the Gulf of Mexico. He determined, whilst he reflected, to cook plenty of crabs and to seek for turtle and so store himself with provisions. But how about watering his little craft? Fresh water, cold and sweet, there was in plenty but he had nothing to put it in and what could he contrive or invent to serve as a breaker? He thought to himself if he could find coconuts he would let the milk drain and fill the fruit with water and so carry away enough to last him until he should be picked up or make a port. He cast his eyes up aloft with a fancy of beholding in the trees something growing that would answer his purpose and started still looking and staring as though fascinated or lightning struck. His eye had sought a tree whose long lower branches overshadowed the little stream and amidst the foliage he thought he saw the figure of a man. The shape jockeyed a bow, its back was upon the tree and now, straining his vision steadily under the sharp of his hand, the man saw that it was the skeleton of a human being apparently lashed or secured to the bow and completely clothed from the sugarloaf had upon his skull down to the rusty yellow sea boots which dangled amidst the leaves. The sailor was alone and the ghastly sight shocked him. The sense of his loneliness was intensified by it. He thought he had been cast away upon the principality of death himself. The diabolic grin in the tree froze the blood in his veins and for a while he could do no more than stare and mutter fragments of the Lord's prayer. He guessed from the costume that the figure had been lodged for a great number of years in that tree. He recollected that when he was a boy he had seen foreign seamen dressed as that skeleton up there was. It was now late in the afternoon and with a shuddering glance aloft he began to consider how and where he should sleep. He walked out of the wood and gained the highest point of the little central hill and looked about him for a sail. There was nothing in sight saving the dim shadows of land, red in the ether of sunset. The skeleton, as though it had been a devil, took possession of the castaway's soul. He could think of nothing else, not even of how he was to get away, how he was to store fresh water for his voyage. He did not mean to sleep in a tree but the leaves provided a roof as sheltering as an awning and he determined to lie down in the wood and take his chance of snakes. Yet before he could rest he must have the skeleton out of it. The shadows would be frightful with the fancy of that figure above riding the bow and rattling its bones to every sigh of the wind. So with a resolved heart made desperate by superstition and fear the sailor walked to the wood and coming to the tree climbed it by the aid of the strong tendrils of parasites which lay coiled round the trunk stout and stiff as ropes. He bestowed a thick bow close to the skeleton. It was a ghastly sight in that green glimmering dusk darkening swiftly with the sinking of the sun. The flesh of the face was gone. The cloak hanging from the shoulders was lean, dusty, ragged as any twelfth-century banner drooping motionless in the gloom of a cathedral. The sailor saw that time and weather had rotted everything saving the bone of the thing. It was secured to the bow by what was or had been a scarf as though the man had feared to fall in his sleep. The seamen stretched forth his hand and to the first touch the scarf parted as though it had been formed of smoke. The figure reeled, dropped, and went to pieces at the foot of the tree. The sailor had not expected this. He was almost afraid to descend. When he reached the ground he fled towards his boat and lay in her all night. He went for a drink of water at daybreak and passing the scattered remains of the skeleton with some degree of heart for daylight brought courage and a few hours of sleep had given him confidence. He spied something glittering amongst the rags of the skeleton's apparel. He picked it up. It was a silver snuff box. He opened it and inside found a piece of paper folded to the shape of the box. It was covered with a scrawl and pencil, faint, yet decipherable. To the man it would have been all one whether the writing had been Chinese or English. He could not read. But he was a wary and cunning old sailor. Every instinct of perception and suspicion was set a crawling by the sight of this queer faintly penciled document and by the look of the silver snuff box which weighed very handsomely in his horny palm yellow with tar. He pocketed the toy and having refreshed himself with a drink of water, returned to the fragments of wearing apparel and old bones no longer afraid and with the handle of his hammer turned the stuff over and in the course of a few minutes met with and pocketed the following articles. A stump of common lead pencil, three pieces of silver Spanish money, a clay pipe mounted in silver in the bone of an Albatross's wing, a silver watch and hair guard and a small gold cross. He talked to himself with a composed countenance as he examined these trifles. Then having hunted after more relics to no purpose he turned his back upon the bones and rags and went about the business of the day. During the morning he collected many crabs but all the while he could not imagine how he was to carry away a store of water till chanceing to look along the brilliant curve of beach he spied a turtle of about 300 pounds coming out of the sea and then he made up his mind to turn a turtle over after dark and cut its throat and make a tub of the shell. Happily for this cast away he was spared the distress of passing another night upon the island. Two or three hours before sundown a steady breeze then blowing from the north a large schooner suddenly rounded the western point of the island at the distance of a couple of miles heading east and steering so as to keep the island fair a beam. The man had collected plenty of brushwood to roast his crabs with. He swiftly kindled a fire and made a smoke with damp leaves and whilst this signal was feathering down the wind he launched and jumped into his boat and with the nimble-experienced hands of the seamen crossed his oars and set his sail of shirt and coat and slowly blew away right before the wind towards the schooner. She saw the smoke and then the boat and hove too and in three quarters of an hour the man was aboard. Who are you? said the master of the schooner when the man stood upon the deck. Christian Hawk, carpenter of the morning star, he answered. What's become of your ship? said the other. Don't know, answered Hawk. What's your yarn? Why, answered Hawk, speaking in a horse-level growling voice, we was becalmed and the captain told me to get into a boat and nail a piece of copper which had worked loose on the rudder. We was flying light. Where from? said the captain suspiciously. From New Orleans to Havana for orders. Well, said the captain. Well, continued Hawk, I was hammering away all night and doing my bit when a squall came along and the ship with a kick-up of her stern let go the painter of her own accord and bolted into the thickness. It was like muck when that squall bursted with me hollering. I lost sight of the vessel and should have been a dead man if it hadn't been for that there-island. After a pause. What island is it, sir? he asked. An island fifteen mile east of Rum Kaye, answered the captain. Hawk had got into his head that the paper in the snuff-box was the record of a treasure secret, but he was afraid to exhibit it and ask questions. He did not know in what language it was written, whether, in fact, it might not be in good English and he thought if he showed the paper and it proved a confession of money burial or something of that sort, the man who read it, knowing where the island was, would forestall him. On the arrival of the schooner at Kingston, Jamaica, Christian Hawk went ashore. He was without money or clothes and had once sold the skeleton's watch and hair-guard for which he received $30. The purchaser of the watch looked at Hawk curiously across the counter after paying down the money and said, where did you get this? It's a family heirloom, answered Hawk, pointing to the watch-guard with a singular grin. This here watch, said Mr. Solomon's, is a hundred years old and a vast curiosity in her verks. Have you more of this sort of thing to sell? If so, I was the most liberal dealer of any man in Jamaica. Hawk gave him a nod and walked out. He found a ship next morning and signed articles as Carpenter and Second Mate. She was sailing for England in a week from that date and was a plump old-fashioned bark of 400 tons. At the sailor's lodging-house he had put up at, he fell into conversation one evening, a day or two before he sailed, with a dark, black-eyed, handsome, intelligent foreign seaman who called himself simply Pedro. This fellow did not scruple to hint that experiences gained both as a contrabendist and pickerone. Just speak many languages, said Hawk, puffing at a long clay pipe and casting his grave slow-moving little eyes upon a tumbler of amber rum at his elbow. I can speak three or four languages, said the foreign seaman. Hawk surveyed him thoughtfully and then, putting down his pipe, thrust his hand in his pocket and extracted the paper from the snuff box without exposing the box. What languages this wrote in, said he, handing the paper to his companion. The man looked at it, frowning with the severity of his gaze, so dim was the pencil-scrawl, so queer the characters, as though the handwriting were the march of a spider's legs over the page. He then exclaimed suddenly, yes, I have it. It is my own language. It is Spanish. Ha! exclaimed Hawk. And what's it all about, mate? How did you come by it, said the man. Found it in an old French testament, answered Hawk. The man glanced at him and then fixed his eyes upon the paper and began to read. He read very slowly, with difficulty deciphering the Spanish and with greater difficulty interpreting it. The two men were alone. The foreign seaman made out the writing to signify this. I who write am Luis de Argenzola, that was second in command of the Gil Polo, commanded by Leonardo de Leon. In a terrible hurricane, the ship that was bound from the Havana to Old Spain was lost. I escaped in a boat with Dona Mariana de Mesa and two seamen. Both men went mad and cast themselves overboard in the night. The Dona Mariana was my cousin. She was following her husband to Madrid. He had preceded her by two months. She had many valuable jewels, the gift of her husband, and some had been for many centuries in possession of her own family, who were nobles of Spain. Before the ship foundered, the Dona urged me to save these jewels, which were in a box in her cabin. I found the box and threw it into the boat and shortly afterwards the ship went down. After five days of anguish we arrived at a little island and 24 hours afterwards the Dona Mariana expired. I had no spade to dig a grave and placed her body in a cave on the left hand side of a little bay opposite the wood or grove where the freshwater stream begins. I have now been here six weeks and have beheld no ship and am without hope and feel as a dying man. Oh, stranger, who shall discover this my writing. To your honor as a man and to your charity as a Christian do I appeal. My own bones may rest in the place where I die. I care not, but I entreat that the remains of the Dona Mariana may be enclosed in a box and carefully conveyed for interment to her relatives at Madrid. And that this may prove no profitless duty to him who undertakes it. Behold, in the foot of the tree I am accustomed to climate night that I may sleep free from the sting of the scorpion you shall find a hole. There within easy reach of your hand lies the box of jewels. This box and the remains of Dona Mariana I entreat of your Christian charity to convey to Alonso Reyes via Garcia, Spain. And I pledge the honor of a Spaniard that one half the value of the jewels shall be given to you. Luis de Argenzola, July 1840. That's 20 years ago, said Hawke, sucking at his pipe. What'll you take for the secret? Said his companion. Eh? If I can find someone to help you to recover those jewels, what share will you give me? Hawke pocketed the paper with a sour smile and went out of the room. His ship sailed and all went well with her. On his arrival in England, as soon as he had taken up his wages and purchased a suit of clothes, he went down to Ramsgate, where, in a little off-street, not far from the entrance to the pier, dwelt his brother Rubin. This man was, by trade, a boat-builder. He also owned some bathing machines. The brothers had not met for some years, nor had they heard from or of each other since they were last together. Yet when Christian, after beating with a little brass knocker upon a little green door, turned the handle and entered straight into a dwelling-room, his brother Rubin, who sat at tea with his wife, two girls, and his wife's grandfather, exhibited no surprise. Their greeting was simply, hello, Christian. Well, Ruby. Christian sat down and partook of tea with the family and related his adventures to the great entertainment of the grandfather, who laughed, till his cheeks were wet at all the pathetic parts, such as Hawke's description of his thirst and his feelings of loneliness when upon the ocean and when lying in the boat at the island. The women cleared away the tea-things and went out. The old grandfather fell asleep, then said Christian to his brother, Ruby, I'm down here to have an earnest chat along with you. So I guessed, said Rubin, who resembled his brother in face, manner, and tone of voice. Still got that cutter a yarn? Jermaine, the petrol? I. Yes, she's lying in the West Gully. She earned me some good money last year as a pleasure boat. I've been thinking of sending her out of fishing. What's her tonnage? 18, wanna buy her, Christian? Not I. Suppose you and me goes down and takes a look at her. Rubin put on his coat and cap, and the brothers issued forth two square figures, the shore gore rolling in his gate like the seafarer, as though in fact he was as fresh from the heave of the sea as the other. They walked along the pier till they came abreast of a stout little cutter lying at her moorings in the thick of a fleet of smacks hailing from grave lines, pinzants, and other places. Christian viewed her in silence with the critical eye of an old sailor and a ship's carpenter to boot. How old she, Ruby? Nine year. She'll do, said Christian. Ruby, I'm gonna spend your a yarn. They went leisurely along the pier, and as they walked, Christian told his brother about the skeleton in the tree and the document in Spanish which he had found in the dead man's snuff box. He produced the snuff box and the paper, also the clay pipe mounted in the bone of an albatross's wing, and the small gold cross. Rubin listened with an eye bright and keen with interest and conviction. The mere sight of the silver box was as convincing to his mind as though he had been carried to the island and stood looking at Ahensela's bones and the hole in the tree in which the box of jewels lay hid. That night the two brothers sat up late, deep in discourse. Christian put 10 pounds upon the table. That's all I own in the world, said he. It'll help to victual the boat. We shall want a navigator, said Rubin. I'm rather ignorant myself of that art and I don't suppose you've learnt yourself to read yet. How ya, Christian? There's young Bob Maxded knows all about shooting of the sun. Us two and him will be hands enough. Shall we make shares? No, said Christian. You and me divides. The other will come along on wages. There's no doubt about the situation of the island, I suppose, said Rubin. No? Let's look at that there's Spanish writing again. Christian produced the snuff box and Rubin opened the paper. Are you cocksure? said Rubin, fastening his eyes upon the dim scrawl. That that there Pedro, as you call him, gave you the right meaning of this writing? Yes, and there was my own experience to back his version. I'm rather for having it made into English again, Christian, said Rubin, thoughtfully. Young Jones, down at Consul Hammond's office, speaks Spanish. What do you say? No, I'm not gonna trust any man but yourself with the secret. See here, if we come back rich, as we'll follow, and you've been meanwhile and shown that there paper to someone who understands it, what'll be thought? The gaff will be blowed. The relatives of that there Marianne'll be getting wind of our hall, and he'll come upon us for the jewels. This and the like reasoning satisfied Rubin, who presently returned the paper to Christian, and after drinking a final glass of grog, the two brothers went to bed. Next day and for some days afterwards, they were full of business. Young Maxded was willing to sail with them. They gave out vaguely that they were bound to the West Indies, partly on pleasure, partly on business. The true character of their errand was not revealed to Maxded, who had agreed for six pounds a month to navigate the little ship into the West Indian seas and back again. Rubin drew all his savings from the bank. 20 pounds and Christian's 10 pounds formed their capital. They provisioned themselves with forecastle fare, adding some bottled beer and a few gallons of rum, and on a fine morning at daybreak when Ramsgate still slumbered and the hush of the night yet brooded over the harbor, the three men hoisted their mainsail and jib and blew softly down the gully and round the head of the pier into the English Channel, which was by this time white with the risen sun and beautiful in the Southwest, where a hundred ships that had lain windbound in the downs were flashing into canvas and moving like a cloud before the light easterly breeze. All went well down Channel with a little craft. She was a stout and buoyant sea boat with a dominant shear of bow coppered to the bends like a revenue cutter and uncommonly stout of scantling for a vessel of her class. She was in good trim and she plunged along stoutly, making fine weather of some ugly seas which ridged to her bow as she drove a slant through the bay. By this time young Maxded had been made acquainted with the cutter's destination and was steering a course for the little island. He plied his sextant nimbly and clearly understood his business. The brothers represented to him that the object of their voyage was to recover some treasure which had been washed ashore out of a small Spanish plate ship and buried. We ain't sure, Christian Hawk told him, that the island we're bound to is the island where the wreck took place. But the herons worth the cost and the time and we mean to have a look round anyhow. Maxded was silent. Perhaps with the proverbial heedlessness of the sailor he was satisfied to take things as they happened. The actual motive of the voyage could be of no interest to him. All that he had to do was to steer the little ship to an island and receive so many sovereigns and wages on their return. They made a swift run for so small a keel. In fact, the island was in sight at the Gray of Dawn 33 days after the start from Ramsgate. Christian Hawk, with a telescope at his eye, quickly recognized the central hill, the soft cloud-like mass of green shadow made by the wood or grove on the right and the slope of the green land to the ivory dazzle of sand vanishing in the foam of the charging coma. He warmly commended Maxded's navigation and both brothers stared with flushed faces and nostrils wide with expectation at the beautiful little cave that lay floating like a jewel full of gleams upon the calm blue brine right ahead. They hoved to and rounded at about a mile from the land and then let go their anchor in 16 fathoms of water. They next launched their little fat Jolly Boat smack fashion through the gangway and Christian and Ruben entered her and pulled away for the land leaving Maxded in charge of the cutter. But little vigilance was needed in such weather as that. The sea was flat and bare and as brilliant as the sky. Under the sun the water trembled in a glory of diamonds to the delicate brushing of a hot light breeze. Nothing broke the silence upon the deep save the low organ-like music of the surf beating on the western and northern boards of the island. Whilst Christian pulled, Ruben, steering the boat with an oar, he talked of his sufferings when in these parts how his jaws had been fixed in a horrid gape by thirst and of the terror that had besieged him when he looked up into the trees and beheld the skeleton. They made direct for the little creek into which Christian had driven his boat and where he had slept on that first and only night he had passed on the island. And when her forefoot grounded they sprang out and hauled the boat high and dry and then with hearts loud in their ears and restless eyes directed their steps towards the little wood. Christian glanced wildly about him imagining that in everything his sight went to he beheld a token of the island having been recently visited. How long will it be since she was here, Christian? Rumbled Ruben in a note subdued by expectation and other passions. Five months answered Christian hoarsely. They walked to the margin of the little wood and arrived at the source of the stream that ran glittering and straying like pearls amidst the tall, sweet green grass that grew in the bed of it. Ruben grasped Christian by the arm. What's that? he cried. It was a human skull and close beside it were the complete bones of a human skeleton together with a little heap of rags. It looked as though the stuff had been rigged together for removal and forgotten. That wasn't how they was left, exclaimed Christian coming to a halt and looking at the bones and rags. There's been a hand, daughter, me here in that job. A boat's crew may have landed and shoveled the stuff together out of a sort of respect for the remains of something that might have been a sailor, exclaimed Ruben. Where's the tree with the hole in it? Christian walked to the place where he had been seated when his eye went to the skeleton aloft. That'll be the tree, said he. It was a large tree, the trunk of the bigness of an English chestnut but dwarfed in altitude. Its beauty was in the spread and curve of its branches. In the hindre part of the trunk, speaking with regard to its bearing from the source of the stream, about five feet above the ground was a large hole partly concealed by the festooning drapery of the leaves of a rich and vigorous parasite which soared and coils to the summit of the tree. Christian put his hand in. Stand by for snakes, shouted Ruben. The other drew out a little common brass tobacco box. What's here, cried he. Try for the jewel box, exclaimed Ruben. Christian entered his hand again and felt round. There's nothing more here, said he. Has it fallen to the bottom? There ain't no hole for it to fall through, cried Christian, still feeling. It's tight as a locker. He looked at the common little brass tobacco box, then opened it and found inside a slip of paper folded to the shape of the box as though in imitation of the snuff box document in Christian's possession. The handwriting was a bold scrawl in ink. With a trembling hand and ashen face, the poor fellow presented the paper to his brother who, putting on his glasses, read aloud as follows, I would have been glad to take a small share to help you find the jewels, but you would not put a little money in my way. Though by interpreting Luis de Argencela's dying request in writing, I was the instrument of your discovering that there lay a treasure to your hand. I therefore arranged with another to seek for the jewels, the situation being exactly known to me because of your ignorance of the Spanish language and perhaps of the art of reading, for at the end of the document and three lines which it did not suit my purpose to interpret to you, Don Luis states how the island bears that in short it is between 10 and 15 miles east of Rumque. My friend, I have found the jewels and thank you for a fortune. They consist of pearl and diamond necklaces, brooches, bracelets, earrings, smelling bottles, rings and diamond ornaments for the hair. I should say they will not fetch less than 10,000 pounds. Your amigo of Kingston, Pedro. I have left the skeletons to your pious care, to coffin and carry to the representatives at Villa Garcia. You will find the remains of Lady Mariana de Mesa in a cave on the west side of the island. The two men burst into a storm of oaths and the little wood rang with forecastle and longshore implications. When they had exhausted their passions, they knelt and drank from the spring of water, then walked to the boat, launched her and returned to the cutter. They arrived in England safely in due course, but sometime later, Ruben was obliged to compound with his creditors. Christian Hawke died in 1868 on board ship, still a carpenter. End of chapter 10, recording by James K. White, Chula Vista.