y the coxswain loosed his grasp upon
the shrouds, and plunged head first into the water.

CHAPTER XXVII

"PIECES OF EIGHT"

Owing to the cant of the vessel, the masts hung far out over the water,
and from my perch on the crosstrees I had nothing below me but the
surface of the bay. Hands, who was not so far up, was, in consequence,
nearer to the ship, and fell between me and the bulwarks. He rose once
to the surface in a lather of foam and blood, and then sank again for
good. As the water settled, I could see him lying huddled together on
the clean, bright sand in the shadow of the vessel's sides. A fish or
two whipped past his body. Sometimes, by the quivering of the water, he
appeared to move a little, as if he were trying to rise. But he was dead
enough, for all that, being both shot and drowned, and was food for fish
in the very place where he had designed my slaughter.

I was no sooner certain of this than I began to feel sick, faint, and
terrified. The hot blood was running over my back and chest. The dirk,
where it had pinned my shoulder to the mast, seemed to burn like a hot
iron; yet it was not so much these real sufferings that distressed me,
for these, it seemed to me, I could bear without a murmur; it was the
horror I had upon my mind of falling from the crosstree into that still,
green water beside the body of the coxswain.

I clung with both hands till my nails ached, and I shut my eyes as if to
cover up the peril. Gradually my mind came back again, my pulses
quieted down to a more natural time, and I was once more in possession
of myself.

It was my first thought to pluck forth the dirk; but either it stuck too
hard or my nerve failed me, and I desisted with a violent shudder. Oddly
enough, that very shudder did the business. The knife, in fact, had come
the nearest in the world to missing me altogether; it held me by a mere
pinch of skin, and this the shudder tore away. The blood ran down the
faster, to be sure, but I was my own master again, and only tacked to
the mast by my coat and shirt.

These last I broke through with a sudden jerk, and then regained the
deck by the starboard shrouds. For nothing in the world would I have
again ventured, shaken as I was, upon the overhanging port shrouds, from
which Israel had so lately fallen.

I went below and did what I could for my wound; it pained me a good
deal, and still bled freely, but it was neither deep nor dangerous, nor
did it greatly