n deadly wrestle, each with a hand upon
the other's throat.

I dropped upon the thwart again, none too soon, for I was near overboard.
I could see nothing for the moment but these two furious, encrimsoned
faces, swaying together under the smoky lamp; and I shut my eyes to let
them grow once more familiar with the darkness.

The endless ballad had come to an end at last, and the whole diminished
company about the camp-fire had broken into the chorus I had heard so
often:--

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

I was just thinking how busy drink and the devil were at that very moment
in the cabin of the _Hispaniola_, when I was surprised by a sudden lurch
of the coracle. At the same moment she yawed sharply and seemed to change
her course. The speed in the meantime had strangely increased.

I opened my eyes at once. All round me were little ripples, combing over
with a sharp, bristling sound, and slightly phosphorescent. The
_Hispaniola_ herself, a few yards in whose wake I was still being whirled
along, seemed to stagger in her course, and I saw her spars toss a little
against the blackness of the night; nay, as I looked longer, I made sure
she also was wheeling to the southward.

I glanced over my shoulder, and my heart jumped against my ribs. There,
right behind me, was the glow of the camp-fire. The current had turned at
right angles, sweeping round along with it the tall schooner and the
little dancing coracle; ever quickening, ever bubbling higher, ever
muttering louder, it went spinning through the narrows for the open sea.

Suddenly the schooner in front of me gave a violent yaw, turning perhaps
through twenty degrees; and almost at the same moment one shout followed
another from on board; I could hear feet pounding on the
companion-ladder; and I knew that the two drunkards had at last been
interrupted in their quarrel and awakened to a sense of their disaster.

I lay down flat in the bottom of that wretched skiff, and devoutly
recommended my spirit to its Maker. At the end of the straits I made sure
we must fall into some bar of raging breakers, where all my troubles
would be ended speedily; and though I could, perhaps, bear to die, I
could not bear to look upon my fate as it approached.

So I must have lain for hours, continually beaten to and fro upon the
billows, now and again