sixty seconds.'

'Good!' said Attwater.

The captain shut his eyes tight like a child: he held his hands up at
last with a tragic and ridiculous gesture.

'My God, for Christ's sake, look after my two kids,' he said; and then,
after a pause and a falter, 'for Christ's sake, Amen.'

And he opened his eyes and looked down the rifle with a quivering mouth.

'But don't keep fooling me long!' he pleaded.

'That's all your prayer?' asked Attwater, with a singular ring in his
voice.

'Guess so,' said Davis.

So?' said Attwater, resting the butt of his rifle on the ground, 'is
that done? Is your peace made with Heaven? Because it is with me. Go,
and sin no more, sinful father. And remember that whatever you do to
others, God shall visit it again a thousand-fold upon your innocents.'

The wretched Davis came staggering forward from his place against the
figure-head, fell upon his knees, and waved his hands, and fainted.

When he came to himself again, his head was on Attwater's arm, and close
by stood one of the men in divers' helmets, holding a bucket of water,
from which his late executioner now laved his face. The memory of that
dreadful passage returned upon him in a clap; again he saw Huish lying
dead, again he seemed to himself to totter on the brink of an unplumbed
eternity. With trembling hands he seized hold of the man whom he had
come to slay; and his voice broke from him like that of a child among
the nightmares of fever: 'O! isn't there no mercy? O! what must I do to
be saved?'

'Ah!' thought Attwater, 'here's the true penitent.'

Chapter 12. TAIL-PIECE

On a very bright, hot, lusty, strongly blowing noon, a fortnight after
the events recorded, and a month since the curtain rose upon this
episode, a man might have been spied, praying on the sand by the lagoon
beach. A point of palm trees isolated him from the settlement; and from
the place where he knelt, the only work of man's hand that interrupted
the expanse, was the schooner Farallone, her berth quite changed, and
rocking at anchor some two miles to windward in the midst of the lagoon.
The noise of the Trade ran very boisterous in all parts of the island;
the nearer palm trees crashed and whistled in the gusts, those farther
off contributed a humming bass like the roar of cities; and yet, to any
man less absorbed, there must have risen at times over this turmoil
of the winds, the sharper note of the human voice from the settlement.
There all