odies. Williams was taken along to get
sheets from the linen room.

We brought the captain up first, laying him on a sheet on the deck and
folding the edges over him. It was terrible work. Even I, fresh from
a medical college, grew nauseated over it. He was heavy. It was slow
work, getting him up. Vail we brought up in the sheets from his bunk.
Of the three, he was the most mutilated. The maid Karen showed only
one injury, a smashing blow on the head, probably from the head of the
axe. For axe it had been, beyond a doubt. I put Williams to work
below to clear away every evidence of what had happened. He went down,
ashy-faced, only to rush up again, refusing to stay alone. I sent
Clarke with him, and instructed Charlie Jones to keep them there until
the cabin was in order.

At three bells the cook brought coffee, and some of the men took it. I
tried to swallow, but it choked me.

Burns had served as second mate on a sailing vessel, and thought he
could take us back, at least into more traveled waters. We decided to
head back to New York. I got the code book from the captain's cabin,
and we agreed to run up the flag, union down, if any other vessel came
in sight. I got the code word for "Mutiny--need assistance," and I
asked the mate if he would signal if a vessel came near enough. But he
turned sullen and refused to answer.

I find it hard to recap calmly the events of that morning: the three
still and shrouded figures, prone on deck; the crew, bareheaded,
standing around, eyeing each other stealthily, with panic ready to leap
free and grip each of them by the throat; the grim determination, the
reason for which I did not yet know, to put the first mate in irons;
and, over all, the clear sunrise of an August morning on the ocean,
rails and decks gleaming, an odor of coffee in the air, the joyous lift
and splash of the bowsprit as the Ella, headed back on her course,
seemed to make for home like a nag for the stable.

Surely none of these men, some weeping, all grieving, could be the
fiend who had committed the crimes. One by one, I looked in their
faces--at Burns, youngest member of the crew, a blue-eyed, sandy-haired
Scot; at Clarke and Adams and Charlie Jones, old in the service of the
Turner line; at McNamara, a shrewd little Irishman; at Oleson the
Swede. And, in spite of myself, I could not help comparing them with
the heavy-shouldered, sodden-faced man below in his cabin, the owner of
the ship