“What makes men snore so?” I thought then, and began to wonder how it was that so gentlemanly a man as the doctor should make such a noise in his sleep. I had never heard him do so before. As a rule he lay down, closed his eyes, and went off fast, breathing as softly as a baby till he woke in the morning. Now his breathing was what doctors call stertorous, heavy and oppressed.
“Oh, how I wish he would wake up and open the window!” I thought; but he did not wake up nor cease breathing so heavily, and I lay thinking about coming to bed on the previous night. That is to say, I lay trying to think about coming to bed, for I could not recall anything. I had some dreamy notion of its having been my watch; but whether I had taken it, or whether it was yet to come and some one was due to rouse me up soon, I could not tell.
“It’s all due to having such a headache,” I thought, “and of course through this horrid air. Why doesn’t he wake up and open the window?”
How long that lasted I cannot tell, but it must have been for some time, during which my brain burned and my thoughts came in a horribly confused manner. I could hear the sounds on deck, and feel that the ship was careening over with the breeze, but these facts suggested nothing to me, and I must have been in quite a stupor, when I was roused by a voice saying angrily—
“Well, what is it?”
I knew the voice from its rough harsh tones, and I lay waiting for some one to answer, but there was no reply, and all was blacker and hotter than ever, when there came the peculiar smacking noise of one passing his tongue over his dry lips, and once more he spoke.
“D’yer hear, what is it?”
There was no reply, and it seemed to me that the speaker was settling himself down to go to sleep again, for he moved uneasily.
“What did yer say, Neb?”
I had not heard Neb Dumlow say anything, and I wondered why I had not, for I did not think I had been to sleep. But I felt that I must have been, or I should have heard.