Two hours later Captain Macadam issues from his cabin and seeks first mate Jack Paul, where the latter is sitting in the shade of the main sail.
“Mon, look at me!” he cries. “D’ye no see? I tell ye, Death has found me oot on the deep watters!”
The single glance assures first mate Jack Paul that Captain Macadam is right. His eyes are congested and ferrety; his face is flushed. Even while first mate Jack Paul looks, he sees the skin turn yellow as a lemon. He thumbs the sick man’s wrist; the pulse is thumping like a trip-hammer. Also, the dry, fevered skin shows an abnormal temperature.
“Your tongue!” says first mate Jack Paul; for he has a working knowledge of yellow jack.
It is but piling evidence upon evidence; the tongue is the color of liver. Three hours later, the doomed man is delirious. Then the fever gives way to a chill; presently he goes raving his way into eternity, and the King George’s Packet loses its Captain.
First mate Jack Paul sews the dead skipper in a hammock with his own fingers; since, mates, crew and cook, not another will bear a hand. When the hammock sewing is over, the cook aids in bringing the corpse on deck. As the body slips from the grating into the sea, a thirty-two pound shot at the heels, the cook laughs overboard at the sharks, still hanging, like hounds upon a scent, to the brig’s wake.
“Ye’ll have to dive for the skipper, lads!” sings out the cook.
Offended by this ribaldry, first mate Jack Paul is on the brink of striking the cook down with a belaying pin. For his own nerves are a-jangle, and that misplaced merriment rasps. It is the look in the man’s face which stays his hand.
“Ye’ll be right!” cries the cook, as though replying to something in the eye of first mate Jack Paul. “Don’t I know it? It is I who’ll follow the skipper! I’ll just go sew my own hammock, and have it ready, shot and all.”
As the cook starts for the galley, a maniac yell is heard from the forecastle. At that, he pauses, sloping his ear to listen.