e
opium-eater; wild struggles with unnatural enemies; wrestlings even for
existence itself. All these I knew during the days that followed my
rash visit to the drinking den. How long I lay, or where, I know not to
this hour; but my dreams were very terrible, and there was a fever at
my head which the ice of a great lake scarce could have cooled. Often I
would know that I had consciousness, and yet I could not move hand or
foot, so that the terror moved me to frenzies of agony, though my lips
were sealed, and I felt myself passing to death. Or I would live again
through the night when Martin Hall died, and from the boat where I
watched the holocaust, I climbed to the shrouds of the cutter, and
stood with my poor friend in the very shelter of the spreading flames.
Or I struggled with Black, having hunted him to his own quarter-deck,
and there with great force of men I sought to lay hands on him; but he
escaped me with a mocking laugh, and when I looked again the deck was
empty.

For short moments the delirium must have left me. Once I opened my
eyes, and knew that the sun shone upon me, and that the breeze which
cooled my forehead blew from the sea; but my fatigue was so great that
I fell asleep in the next instant, and enjoyed pure rest during many
hours. When I regained consciousness for the second time, it was
because rain beat upon my face, a drizzling warm rain of late summer,
and there was spray from a fresh sea. For some minutes I set myself to
ask where I was; but I knew that I was bound at the left hand and at my
feet, and, to my unutterable astonishment, when I raised my head, I saw
that I lay in an open boat which was moving very slowly, but my feet
were towards the stern of it, and, as my head lay below the level of
the gunwale, I could see nothing of the power which moved the boat or
of the scene about us.

It was a long time before my throbbing head let me put together a chain
of thought to account for my position. The scene at the drinking den
would not at first come back to me, think as I would; but when it did,
the clue which was lacking came with it. There could be no doubt that I
had walked into a trap, and that the hag who had struck me had been in
the pay of Paolo and his crew. These men must have taken me as I lay,
and so brought me to this boat; but what time had intervened, or where
I was, I knew no better than the dead. Only this was sure, that I was
in the hands of one of the greatest scoundrel