But I bettered the method. Yesterday I overhauled the medicine-
chest, and I dosed my chunks of fat pork and bread with the contents
of every bottle that bore a label of skull and cross-bones. I even
added rough-on-rats to the deadliness of the mixture--this on the
suggestion of the steward.
And 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.
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