aware that Manuel had taken this opportunity to wrench himself free. I
heard the hard thud of his leap. Straight from the hatch (as I was told
later by the marvelling sailors) he had alighted with both feet on the
rail. I only saw him already there, sitting on his heels, jabbering and
nodding at us like an enormous baboon. "Shoot, sir! Shoot!" "Kill! Kill,
Senor! As you love your life--kill!"

Unwittingly, without volition, as if compelled by the suggestion of the
bloodthirsty cries, my hand drew the remaining pistol out of my belt. I
raised it, and found myself covering the strange antics of an infuriated
ape. He tore at his flanks with both hands in the idea, I suppose,
of stripping for a swim. Rags flew from him in all directions; an
astounding eruption of rags round a huddled-up figure crouching, wildly
active, in front of the muzzle. I had him. I was sure of my shot. He was
only an ape. A dead ape. But why? Wherefore? To what end? What could it
matter whether he lived or died. He sickened me, and I pitied him, as I
should have pitied an ape.

I lowered my arm an almost imperceptible fraction of a second before he
sprang up and vanished. The sound of the heavy plunge was followed by
a regretful clamour all over the decks, and a general rush to the side.
There was nothing to be seen; he had gone through the layer of fog
covering the water. No one heard him blow or splutter. It was as if a
lump of lead had fallen overboard.

Williams wouldn't have had this happen for a five-pound note. Sebright
expressed the hope that he wouldn't cheat the gallows by drowning. The
two men who had held him slunk away abashed. To lower a boat for
the purpose of catching him in the water would have been useless and
imprudent.

"His friends can't be far off yet in the boats," growled the bo'sun;
"and if they don't pick him up, they would be more than likely to pick
up our chaps."

Somebody expectorated in so marked a manner that I looked behind me.
Castro had resumed his cloak, and was draping himself with deliberate
dignity. When this undertaking had been accomplished, he came up very
close to me, and without a word looked up balefully from the heavy folds
thrown across his mouth and chin under the very tip of his hooked nose.

"I could not do it," I said. "I could not. It would have been useless.
Too much like murder, Tomas."

"Oh! the inconstancy, the fancifulness of these English," he
generalized, with suppressed passion, rig