requested me to keep for her a few days.
The sight of this ball--in which I can detect nothing that could be
likely to arouse any feelings of violence--appears to have driven
these two men entirely mad, so that they instantly made the most
ferocious and murderous assault upon me. See! wouldst thou have
believed that so small a thing as this would have caused so much
trouble?" And as he spoke he held up to the gaze of the other the
cause of the double tragedy that had befallen. But no sooner had
Captain Willitts's eyes lighted upon the ball than the most singular
change passed over his countenance. The color appeared to grow dull
and yellow in his ruddy cheeks, his fat lips dropped apart, and his
eyes stared with a fixed and glassy glare. He arose to his feet and,
still with the expression of astonishment and wonder upon his face,
gazed first at our hero and then at the ivory ball in his hands, as
though he were deprived both of reason and of speech. At last, as our
hero slipped the trifle back in his pocket again, the mariner slowly
recovered himself, though with a prodigious effort, and drew a deep
and profound breath as to the very bottom of his lungs. He wiped, with
the corner of his black-silk cravat, his brow, upon which the sweat
appeared to have gathered. "Well, messmate," says he, at last, with a
sudden change of voice, "you have, indeed, had a most wonderful
adventure." Then with another deep breath: "Well, by the blood! I may
tell you plainly that I am no poor hand at the reading of faces. Well,
I think you to be honest, and I am inclined to believe every word you
tell me. By the blood! I am prodigiously sorry for you, and am
inclined to help you out of your scrape.

"The first thing to do," he continued, "is to get rid of these two
dead men, and that is an affair I believe we shall have no trouble in
handling. One of them we will wrap up in the carpet here, and t'other
we can roll into yonder bed curtain. You shall carry the one and I the
other, and, the harbor being at no great distance, we can easily bring
them thither and tumble them overboard, and no one will be the wiser
of what has happened. For your own safety, as you may easily see, you
can hardly go away and leave these objects here to be found by the
first comer, and to rise up in evidence against you."

This reasoning, in our hero's present bewildered state, appeared to
him to be so extremely just that he raised not the least objection to
it. Acc