wide awake; "but it was murder!"

I lay after that wide awake, staring at my memories. In some odd way
these visions mixed up with my dream of in my uncle in his despair.
The black body which saw now damaged and partly buried, but which,
nevertheless, I no longer felt was dead but acutely alive and
perceiving, I mixed up with the ochreous slash under my uncle's face. I
tried to dismiss this horrible obsession from my mind, but it prevailed
over all my efforts.

The next day was utterly black with my sense of that ugly creature's
body. I am the least superstitious of men, but it drew me. It drew me
back into those thickets to the very place where I had hidden him.

Some evil and detestable beast had been at him, and he lay disinterred.

Methodically I buried his swollen and mangled carcass again, and
returned to the ship for another night of dreams. Next day for all the
morning I resisted the impulse to go to him, and played nap with Pollack
with my secret gnawing at me, and in the evening started to go and was
near benighted. I never told a soul of them of this thing I had done.

Next day I went early, and he had gone, and there were human footmarks
and ugly stains round the muddy hole from which he had been dragged.

I returned to the ship, disconcerted and perplexed. That day it was the
men came aft, with blistered hands and faces, and sullen eyes. When they
proclaimed, through Edwards, their spokesman, "We've had enough of this,
and we mean it," I answered very readily, "So have I. Let's go."

VII

We were none too soon. People had been reconnoitring us, the telegraph
had been at work, and we were not four hours at sea before we ran
against the gunboat that had been sent down the coast to look for us and
that would have caught us behind the island like a beast in a trap. It
was a night of driving cloud that gave intermittent gleams of moonlight;
the wind and sea were strong and we were rolling along through a drift
of rails and mist. Suddenly the world was white with moonshine. The
gunboat came out as a long dark shape wallowing on the water to the
east.

She sighted the Maud Mary at once, and fired some sort of popgun to
arrest us.

The mate turned to me.

"Shall I tell the captain?"

"The captain be damned" said I, and we let him sleep through two hours
of chase till a rainstorm swallowed us up. Then we changed our course
and sailed right across them, and by morning only her smoke was showing.

We w