n and astounding
detonation of a pistol-shot, and for a moment he wondered whether he
had received a mortal wound without being aware of it. Then suddenly
he beheld an extraordinary and dreadful transformation take place in
the countenance thrust so close to his own; the eyes winked several
times with incredible rapidity, and then rolled upward and inward; the
jaws gaped into a dreadful and cavernous yawn; the pistol fell with a
clatter to the floor, and the next moment the muscles, so rigid but an
instant before, relaxed into a limp and listless flaccidity. The
joints collapsed, and the entire man fell into an indistinguishable
heap upon and across the dead figure stretched out upon the floor,
while at the same time a pungent and blinding cloud of gunpowder smoke
filled the apartment. For a few moments the hands twitched
convulsively; the neck stretched itself to an abominable length; the
long, lean legs slowly and gradually relaxed, and every fibre of the
body gradually collapsed into the lassitude of death. A spot of blood
appeared and grew upon the collar at the throat, and in the same degree
the color ebbed from the face leaving it of a dull and leaden pallor.

All these terrible and formidable changes of aspect our hero stood
watching with a motionless and riveted attention, and as though they
were to him matters of the utmost consequence and importance; and only
when the last flicker of life had departed from his second victim did
he lift his gaze from this terrible scene of dissolution to stare about
him, this way and that, his eyes blinded, and his breath stifled by the
thick cloud of sulphurous smoke that obscured the objects about him in
a pungent cloud.

V. The Unexpected Encounter with the Sea-captain with the Broken Nose

If our hero had been distracted and bedazed by the first catastrophe
that had befallen, this second and even more dreadful and violent
occurrence appeared to take away from him, for the moment, every power
of thought and of sensation. All that perturbation of emotion that had
before convulsed him he discovered to have disappeared, and in its
stead a benumbed and blinded intelligence alone remained to him. As he
stood in the presence of this second death, of which he had been as
innocent and as unwilling an instrument as he had of the first, he
could observe no signs either of remorse or of horror within him. He
picked up his hat, which had fallen upon the floor in the fir