tance the tarnish left by the sail. But later he had known
that it was no loadstone drawing at her iron. The motion was due--must
be due--to the absolute deadness of the calm in that silent, sinister,
three-miles-broad waterway. With the eye of his mind he saw that
loadstone now as he lay against a gun-truck, all but toppling down the
deck. Soon that would happen again which had happened for five days past.
He would hear again the chattering of monkeys and the screaming of
parrots, the mat of green and yellow weeds would creep in towards the
Mary over the quicksilver sea, once more the sheer wall of rock would
rise, and the men would run....

But no; the men would not run this time to drop the fenders. There were
no men left to do so, unless Bligh was still alive. Perhaps Bligh was
still alive. He had walked half-way down the quarter-deck steps a little
before the sudden nightfall of the day before, had then fallen and lain
for a minute (dead, Abel Keeling had supposed, watching him from his
place by the gun-truck), and had then got up again and tottered forward
to the forecastle, his tall figure swaying and his long arms waving. Abel
Keeling had not seen him since. Most likely, he had died in the
forecastle during the night. If he had not been dead he would have come
aft again for water....

At the remembrance of the water Abel Keeling lifted his head. The strands
of lean muscle about his emaciated mouth worked, and he made a little
pressure of his sun-blackened hand on the deck, as if to verify its
steepness and his own balance. The mainmast was some seven or eight yards
away.... He put one stiff leg under him and began, seated as he was, to
make shuffling movements down the slope.

To the mainmast, near the belfry, was affixed his contrivance for
catching water. It consisted of a collar of rope set lower at one side
than at the other (but that had been before the mast had steeved so many
degrees away from the zenith), and tallowed beneath. The mists lingered
later in that gully of a strait than they did on the open ocean, and the
collar of rope served as a collector for the dews that condensed on the
mast. The drops fell into a small earthen pipkin placed on the deck
beneath it.

Abel Keeling reached the pipkin and looked into it. It was nearly a third
full of fresh water. Good. If Bligh, the mate, was dead, so much the more
water for Abel Keeling, master of the _Mary of the Tower_. He dipped two
fingers into the