nd decay (though interrupted by a thousand years of the sepulchre)
as if his life had been without this black hiatus, and he was proceeding
steadily and humanly from the cradle. But collecting that the vital
spark could never have been extinguished in him, I understood that time,
which has absolute control over life, still knew him as its prey during
all those forty-eight years in which he had lain frozen; that it had
seized him now and suddenly, and pinned upon his back the full burden of
his lustres. This I say, I believed; but the morrow, of course, would
give me further proof.

Well, 'twas a happy and gracious deliverance for me. He could do me no
hurt; the scythe had sheared his talons, and all without occasioning my
conscience the least uneasiness whatever: whereas, but for this
interposition, I did truly and solemnly believe that it must have come
to my having had to slay him that I might preserve my own life.

Thus I sat for an hour smoking and wetting my lips with the punch,
whilst the fire burned low, so exulting in the thought of my escape from
the treacherous villain I had recovered from the grave, and in the
feeling that I might now be able to go to rest, to move here and there,
to act as I pleased without being haunted and terrified by the shadow of
his foul intent, that I hardly gave my mind for a moment to the
situation of the schooner nor to the barren consequences of my fine
scheme of mines.

The wind blew strong. I could hear the humming of it in every fibre of
the vessel. The bed on which she rested trembled to the blows of the
seas upon the rocks. From time to time, in the midst of my musing, I
started to the sharp claps of parted ice. Still feeling sleepless, I
threw a few coals on the fire, and catching sight of the pirate flag
opened it on the deck as wide as the space would permit, and sat down to
contemplate the hideous insignia embroidered on it. My mind filled with
a hundred fancies as my gaze went from the skull on the black field to
the death's-head pipe that had fallen from the grasp of Tassard and lay
on the deck, and I was sitting lost in a deep dreamlike contemplation,
when I was startled and shocked into instantaneous activity by a blast
of noise, louder than any thunder-clap that ever I heard, ringing and
booming through the schooner. This was followed by a second and then a
third, at intervals during which you might have counted ten, and I
became sensible of a strange sickening mot