ence remained sane enough to turn
his face away from the water. But as he lay crouched in a heap in the
bottom of the boat, with a silent prayer in his heart to his Creator to
quickly end his sufferings, he heard "Boston Ned" and the only remaining
sane man except himself muttering hoarsely together and looking
sometimes at him and sometimes at the two almost dying men who lay
moaning beside him. Presently the man who was talking to Ned pulled out
of his blanket--which lay in the stern-sheets--a razor, and turning his
back to Renton began stropping it upon the sole of his boot, and even
"Boston Ned" himself looked with awful eyes and blood-baked twitching
lips upon the youngster.

The lad saw what was coming, and as quickly as possible made his way
forward and sat there, with his eyes fixed upon the two men aft, waiting
for the struggle which he thought must soon begin. All that day and the
night he sat and watched, determined to make a fight for the little life
which remained in him, and Ned and the other man at times still muttered
and eyed him wolfishly.

And so, on and on, these seeming outcasts of God's mercy sailed before
the warm breath of the south-east trade wind, above them the blazing
tropic sun, around them the wide, sailless expanse of the blue Pacific
unbroken in its dreadful loneliness except for a wandering grey-winged
booby or flocks of whale-birds floating upon its gentle swell, and
within their all but deadened hearts naught but grim despair and a
dulled sense of coming dissolution.

As he sat thus, supporting his swollen head upon his skeleton hands,
Renton saw something astern, moving slowly after the boat--something
that he knew was waiting and following for the awful deed to be done, so
that _it_ too might share in the dreadful feast.

Raising his bony arm, he pointed towards the moving fin. To him a
shark meant no added horror or danger to their position, but possibly
deliverance. "Boston Ned" and the other man first looked at the coming
shark, and then with sunken eyes again turned to Renton. Voices none of
them had, and the lad's parched tongue could not articulate, but with
signs and lip movements he tried to make the other two men understand.

No shark hook had they; nor, if they had had one, had they anything
with which to bait it. But Renton, crawling aft, picked up the harpoon,
placed it in "Boston Ned's" hands, and motioned to him to stand by.
Then with eager, trembling hands he stri