to a more natural time, and I was once more in possession of myself.

It was my first thought to pluck forth the dirk; but either it stuck too
hard or my nerve failed me; and I desisted with a violent shudder. Oddly
enough, that very shudder did the business. The knife, in fact, had come
the nearest in the world to missing me altogether; it held me by a mere
pinch of skin, and this the shudder tore away. The blood ran down the
faster, to be sure; but I was my own master again, and only tacked to the
mast by my coat and shirt.

These last I broke through with a sudden jerk, and then regained the deck
by the starboard shrouds. For nothing in the world would I have again
ventured, shaken as I was, upon the overhanging port shrouds, from which
Israel had so lately fallen.

I went below, and did what I could for my wound; it pained me a good
deal, and still bled freely; but it was neither deep nor dangerous, nor
did it greatly gall me when I used my arm. Then I looked around me, and
as the ship was now, in a sense, my own, I began to think of clearing it
from its last passenger--the dead man, O'Brien.

He had pitched, as I have said, against the bulwarks, where he lay like
some horrible, ungainly sort of puppet; life-size, indeed, but how
different from life's colour or life's comeliness! In that position I
could easily have my way with him; and as the habit of tragical
adventures had worn off almost all my terror for the dead, I took him by
the waist as if he had been a sack of bran, and with one good heave
tumbled him overboard. He went in with a sounding plunge; the red cap
came off, and remained floating on the surface; and as soon as the splash
subsided, I could see him and Israel lying side by side, both wavering
with the tremulous movement of the water. O'Brien, though still quite a
young man, was very bald. There he lay, with that bald head across the
knees of the man who had killed him, and the quick fishes steering to and
fro over both.

I was now alone upon the ship; the tide had just turned. The sun was
within so few degrees of setting that already the shadow of the pines
upon the western shore began to reach right across the anchorage, and
fall in patterns on the deck. The evening breeze had sprung up, and
though it was well warded off by the hill with the two peaks upon the
east, the cordage had begun to sing a little softly to itself and the
idle sails to rattle to and fro.

I began to see a danger to th