ear, and his skinny hands outstretched in a vain
endeavour to reach the gunwale of the boat. Then, almost in the self-
same instant, and before one's benumbed senses found time to realise the
ghastly tragedy, there was a rapid swirl of water alongside, an ear-
splitting yell, and the miserable man was dragged down, an ensanguined
patch in the deep crystalline blue, and a few transitory air-bubbles
alone marking the spot from which he had vanished. Involuntarily I
glanced astern. There was but one shark's fin now visible!

"Shame upon you, men; shame upon you!" cried I, emerging from the
temporary trance of stupefaction which seemed to have seized me while
this frightful tragedy was in progress. "You have taken a human life,
and branded yourselves as murderers. And for what? Simply because that
poor craven of a fellow appropriated a small morsel of putrid meat and a
few drops of disgusting liquid that, evenly divided among you all, could
have done you no appreciable good. At most, it could but have prolonged
your lives an hour or two."

"Ay, that's just it!" huskily interrupted one of the men. "The meat and
the water that we've lost would have give us another hour or two of
life, and who's to say that just that hour or two mightn't have made all
the difference between livin' and dyin' to us? If anything was to
happen to drift into view within the next few hours, that bit of meat
and they few drops of water might have give us strength enough to handle
the oars again and pull far enough to be sighted and picked up; but now
we're done for, all hands of us. Our strength is gone, and we've
nothin' left to give it back to us, even if a whole fleet was in sight
at this present moment. When that chap stole the last of our grub he
stole our lives with it. He's the murderer, not us, and he deserved
what he got! Oh, my God, water! Give us water, for Christ's sake!"

And, throwing up his poor, lean, shrivelled hands toward the cloudless
sky, with a gesture eloquent of frantic, despairing appeal, the poor,
tortured creature suddenly collapsed and fell senseless athwart the
gunwale of the boat, with his arms hanging down into the water. We
dragged him quickly inboard again, but we were not a second too soon,
for we had scarcely done so when the remaining shark was alongside,
glaring up at us with a look of fell longing in those cruel goggle eyes
of his, that seemed to say he intended to have his prey sooner or later,