the rigging overhead,
and the crash of a falling body on the deck near us. Then we were
closing with a kicking, biting, screaming thing, that bore me to the
ground, extinguishing the little electric flash, and that, rising
suddenly from under me, had McWhirter in the air, and almost overboard
before I caught him. So dazed were we by the onslaught that the
thing--whatever it was--could have escaped, and left us none the wiser.
But, although it eluded us in the darkness, it did not leave. It was
there, whimpering to itself, searching for something--the sheet. As I
steadied Mac, it passed me. I caught at it. Immediately the struggle
began all over again. But this time we had the advantage, and kept it.
After a battle that seemed to last all night, and that was actually
fought all over that part of the deck, we held the creature subdued,
and Mac, getting a hand free, struck a match.

It was Charlie Jones.

That, after all, is the story. Jones was a madman, a homicidal maniac
of the worst type. Always a madman, the homicidal element of his
disease was recurrent and of a curious nature.

He thought himself a priest of heaven, appointed to make ghastly
sacrifices at certain signals from on high. The signals I am not sure
of; he turned taciturn after his capture and would not talk. I am
inclined to think that a shooting star, perhaps in a particular quarter
of the heavens, was his signal. This is distinctly possible, and is
made probable by the stars which he had painted with tar on his
sacrificial robe.

The story of the early morning of August 12 will never be fully known;
but much of it, in view of our knowledge, we were able to reconstruct.
Thus--Jones ate his supper that night, a mild and well-disposed
individual. During the afternoon before, he had read prayers for the
soul of Schwartz, in whose departure he may or may not have had a part
I am inclined to think not, Jones construing his mission as being one
to remove the wicked and the oppressor, and Schwartz hardly coming
under either classification.

He was at the wheel from midnight until four in the morning on the
night of the murders. At certain hours we believe that he went forward
to the forecastle-head, and performed, clad in his priestly robe, such
devotions as his disordered mind dictated. It is my idea that he
looked, at these times, for a heavenly signal, either a meteor or some
strange appearance of the heavens. It was known that he was