hove on the wheel and kicked rats from underfoot. 'A hero by the toll
of twenty-four deaths. Down off the river Plate I didn't realize the
horror of all this. Off St.-Louis I did, and advised you. You
withstood, to be a hero. Well, I'm sorry for you, that's all.'

"A big rat jumped from the wheel-box at this moment, climbed my
clothing, and had reached my chest before I knocked it off with my
fist.

"'You see, Barnes, the rat does not know, and I did not kill it. But
you do know, and I shall hasten your death with a bullet if you
approach me. It will not be murder, nor manslaughter. It will be an act
of mercy; but I cannot do it now. See how I feel?'

"'Oh, God!' he shrieked, running away from me. He reached the break of
the poop, then turned and came back.

"'Got your gun on you, Draper? Kill me now; kill me, and have it over
with. I'm down and done for. There's nothing more for me.'

"I refused; and yet I know that with regard to that man's mental agony
for the next few days, culminating in the first physical symptoms of
unrest, fever, and thirst, I should have obeyed his request. He was
doomed, and knew it. And he was a madman from mental causes before the
physical had produced effects, even though the disease ran its course
quickly in him. On the third day he was raving of a black-eyed woman
who kept a candy store in Boston, and who had promised to marry him
when he obtained command.

"I got out a bottle of bromide from the medicine chest and induced
Barnes to take a good dose of it. He drank about half a teacup of it,
and in an hour was asleep. Then, clad in boots and mittens, with a
sailor's clothes-bag over my head, I went aloft and lashed myself in
the mizzentopmast crosstrees, where I obtained about six hours' sleep,
which I needed badly. Barnes was worse when I came down; three more
rats had bitten him, he declared, and he begged me to shoot him. It
never occurred to him to do the job himself, and I couldn't suggest it
to him.

"'Well, Draper,' he said at last, 'I'm going, and I know it. Now, if
you escape, sometime you'll be in Boston. Will you take the street-car
out the Boston Road, and at Number 24 Middlesex Place drop in and say a
few words to that woman? Call her Kate, and say we were shipmates, and
I told you to. Tell her about this, and that I thought of her, and
didn't want to die because of her. Tell her, will you, Draper?'

"'Barnes, I promise,' I said. 'I will hunt up or write to that woma