thus, your instinct of immortality will go glimmering, and your
instinct of life, which is longing for life, will flutter up, and you
will struggle to save yourself. Eh? I see the fear of death in your
eyes. You beat the air with your arms. You exert all your puny strength
to struggle to live. Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as
a butterfly resting there. Your chest is heaving, your tongue
protruding, your skin turning dark, your eyes swimming. 'To live! To
live! To live!' you are crying; and you are crying to live here and now,
not hereafter. You doubt your immortality, eh? Ha! ha! You are not
sure of it. You won't chance it. This life only you are certain is
real. Ah, it is growing dark and darker. It is the darkness of death,
the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is
gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around you. Your eyes
are becoming set. They are glazing. My voice sounds faint and far. You
cannot see my face. And still you struggle in my grip. You kick with
your legs. Your body draws itself up in knots like a snake's. Your
chest heaves and strains. To live! To live! To live--"

I heard no more. Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he had so
graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on the floor
and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully with that old
familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.

"Well, have I convinced you?" he demanded. "Here take a drink of this.
I want to ask you some questions."

I rolled my head negatively on the floor. "Your arguments are
too--er--forcible," I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to my
aching throat.

"You'll be all right in half-an-hour," he assured me. "And I promise I
won't use any more physical demonstrations. Get up now. You can sit on
a chair."

And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the
Preacher was resumed. And half the night we sat up over it.

CHAPTER XII

The last twenty-four hours have witnessed a carnival of brutality. From
cabin to forecastle it seems to have broken out like a contagion. I
scarcely know where to begin. Wolf Larsen was really the cause of it.
The relations among the men, strained and made tense by feuds, quarrels
and grudges, were in a state of unstable equilibrium, and evil passions
flared up in flame like prairie-grass.

Thomas Mugridge is a sneak, a spy, an inform