e ends, both top and bottom, had come unsealed. . . .

But why record all the swift steps of the appalling discovery? You have
guessed the truth already. There was the wrapper, the bottle, and the
white powder inside, some sort of powder! But it wasn't quinine. One
look at it was quite enough. I remember that at the very moment of
picking up the bottle, before I even dealt with the wrapper, the weight
of the object I had in my hand gave me an instant premonition. Quinine
is as light as feathers; and my nerves must have been exasperated into
an extraordinary sensibility. I let the bottle smash itself on the
floor. The stuff, whatever it was, felt gritty under the sole of my
shoe. I snatched up the next bottle and then the next. The weight alone
told the tale. One after another they fell, breaking at my feet, not
because I threw them down in my dismay, but slipping through my fingers
as if this disclosure were too much for my strength.

It is a fact that the very greatness of a mental shock helps one to bear
up against it by producing a sort of temporary insensibility. I came out
of the state-room stunned, as if something heavy had dropped on my head.
From the other side of the saloon, across the table, Ransome, with a
duster in his hand, stared open-mouthed. I don't think that I looked
wild. It is quite possible that I appeared to be in a hurry because
I was instinctively hastening up on deck. An example this of training
become instinct. The difficulties, the dangers, the problems of a ship
at sea must be met on deck.

To this fact, as it were of nature, I responded instinctively; which
may be taken as a proof that for a moment I must have been robbed of my
reason.

I was certainly off my balance, a prey to impulse, for at the bottom of
the stairs I turned and flung myself at the doorway of Mr. Burns' cabin.
The wildness of his aspect checked my mental disorder. He was sitting up
in his bunk, his body looking immensely long, his head drooping a little
sideways, with affected complacency. He flourished, in his trembling
hand, on the end of a forearm no thicker than a walking-stick, a shining
pair of scissors which he tried before my very eyes to jab at his
throat.

I was to a certain extent horrified; but it was rather a secondary sort
of effect, not really strong enough to make me yell at him in some such
manner as: "Stop!" . . . "Heavens!" . . . "What are you doing?"

In reality he was simply overtaxing his return