ond plunge below.

The source of the smoke must be very close to Wolf Larsen--my mind was
made up to this, and I went straight to his bunk. As I felt about among
his blankets, something hot fell on the back of my hand. It burned me,
and I jerked my hand away. Then I understood. Through the cracks in the
bottom of the upper bunk he had set fire to the mattress. He still
retained sufficient use of his left arm to do this. The damp straw of
the mattress, fired from beneath and denied air, had been smouldering all
the while.

As I dragged the mattress out of the bunk it seemed to disintegrate in
mid-air, at the same time bursting into flames. I beat out the burning
remnants of straw in the bunk, then made a dash for the deck for fresh
air.

Several buckets of water sufficed to put out the burning mattress in the
middle of the steerage floor; and ten minutes later, when the smoke had
fairly cleared, I allowed Maud to come below. Wolf Larsen was
unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the fresh air to restore
him. We were working over him, however, when he signed for paper and
pencil.

"Pray do not interrupt me," he wrote. "I am smiling."

"I am still a bit of the ferment, you see," he wrote a little later.

"I am glad you are as small a bit as you are," I said.

"Thank you," he wrote. "But just think of how much smaller I shall be
before I die."

"And yet I am all here, Hump," he wrote with a final flourish. "I can
think more clearly than ever in my life before. Nothing to disturb me.
Concentration is perfect. I am all here and more than here."

It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man's body
had become his mausoleum. And there, in so strange sepulchre, his spirit
fluttered and lived. It would flutter and live till the last line of
communication was broken, and after that who was to say how much longer
it might continue to flutter and live?

CHAPTER XXXVIII

"I think my left side is going," Wolf Larsen wrote, the morning after his
attempt to fire the ship. "The numbness is growing. I can hardly move
my hand. You will have to speak louder. The last lines are going down."

"Are you in pain?" I asked.

I was compelled to repeat my question loudly before he answered:

"Not all the time."

The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and it was
with extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl. It was like a
"spirit message," such