d to-day, behold, there is no bird left in the sky. True, while I
played my game yesterday, the mutineers hooked a few of the birds; but
now the rest are gone, and that is bound to be the last food for the men
for'ard until they resume duty.

Yes; it is grotesque. It is a boy's game. It reads like Midshipman
Easy, like Frank Mildmay, like Frank Reade, Jr.; and yet, i' faith, life
and death's in the issue. I have just gone over the toll of our dead
since the voyage began.

First, was Christian Jespersen, killed by O'Sullivan when that maniac
aspired to throw overboard Andy Fay's sea-boots; then O'Sullivan, because
he interfered with Charles Davis' sleep, brained by that worthy with a
steel marlin-spike; next Petro Marinkovich, just ere we began the passage
of the Horn, murdered undoubtedly by the gangster clique, his life cut
out of him with knives, his carcass left lying on deck to be found by us
and be buried by us; and the Samurai, Captain West, a sudden though not a
violent death, albeit occurring in the midst of all elemental violence as
Mr. Pike clawed the _Elsinore_ off the lee-shore of the Horn; and Boney
the Splinter, following, washed overboard to drown as we cleared the sea-
gashing rock-tooth where the southern tip of the continent bit into the
storm-wrath of the Antarctic; and the big-footed, clumsy youth of a
Finnish carpenter, hove overside as a Jonah by his fellows who believed
that Finns control the winds; and Mike Cipriani and Bill Quigley, Rome
and Ireland, shot down on the poop and flung overboard alive by Mr. Pike,
still alive and clinging to the log-line, cut adrift by the steward to be
eaten alive by great-beaked albatrosses, mollyhawks, and sooty-plumaged
Cape hens; Steve Roberts, one-time cowboy, shot by me as he tried to
shoot me; Herman Lunkenheimer, his throat cut before all of us by the
hound Bombini as Kid Twist stretched the throat taut from behind; the two
mates, Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire, mutually destroying each other in what
must have been an unwitnessed epic combat; Ditman Olansen, speared by
Wada as he charged Berserk at the head of the mutineers in the attempt to
rush the poop; and last, Henry, the cadet of the perishing house, shot at
the wheel, from the ventilator-shaft, in the course of his day's work.

No; as I contemplate this roll-call of the dead which I have just made I
see that we are not playing a boy's game. Why, we have lost a third of
us, and the bloodiest battles