ise with your
conscience when you make yourself a party to it. If you were really
great, really true to yourself, you would join forces with Leach and
Johnson. But you are afraid, you are afraid. You want to live. The
life that is in you cries out that it must live, no matter what the cost;
so you live ignominiously, untrue to the best you dream of, sinning
against your whole pitiful little code, and, if there were a hell,
heading your soul straight for it. Bah! I play the braver part. I do
no sin, for I am true to the promptings of the life that is in me. I am
sincere with my soul at least, and that is what you are not."

There was a sting in what he said. Perhaps, after all, I was playing a
cowardly part. And the more I thought about it the more it appeared that
my duty to myself lay in doing what he had advised, lay in joining forces
with Johnson and Leach and working for his death. Right here, I think,
entered the austere conscience of my Puritan ancestry, impelling me
toward lurid deeds and sanctioning even murder as right conduct. I dwelt
upon the idea. It would be a most moral act to rid the world of such a
monster. Humanity would be better and happier for it, life fairer and
sweeter.

I pondered it long, lying sleepless in my bunk and reviewing in endless
procession the facts of the situation. I talked with Johnson and Leach,
during the night watches when Wolf Larsen was below. Both men had lost
hope--Johnson, because of temperamental despondency; Leach, because he
had beaten himself out in the vain struggle and was exhausted. But he
caught my hand in a passionate grip one night, saying:

"I think yer square, Mr. Van Weyden. But stay where you are and keep yer
mouth shut. Say nothin' but saw wood. We're dead men, I know it; but
all the same you might be able to do us a favour some time when we need
it damn bad."

It was only next day, when Wainwright Island loomed to windward, close
abeam, that Wolf Larsen opened his mouth in prophecy. He had attacked
Johnson, been attacked by Leach, and had just finished whipping the pair
of them.

"Leach," he said, "you know I'm going to kill you some time or other,
don't you?"

A snarl was the answer.

"And as for you, Johnson, you'll get so tired of life before I'm through
with you that you'll fling yourself over the side. See if you don't."

"That's a suggestion," he added, in an aside to me. "I'll bet you a
month's pay he acts upon it."