For what were they watching? It might be some wild beast with teeth and claws that would rend him if he were the one who seized it, and the longer he waited the more reasonable this seemed to be. It was a creature that lived in a cave, or some deep rift among the rocks by day, and came prowling out by night in search of food. Such a creature as this must be dangerous.
But the next moment he laughed to himself as he recalled that rabbits and many other creatures sought their food by night, and were innocent and harmless as doves. Yet still the feeling of dread came back, and he longed for an end of the watch.
“I like danger that I can see,” he thought, as he began involuntarily rubbing his shoulder that had been struck by the shark, and had taken to aching in the moist cool night.
He shivered a little as he recalled the scene that day when he first realised the danger of the hideous fish marking him down; and try how he would the scene kept growing more vivid.
“I never half thanked those men for saving my life,” he said to himself. “The brute would have had me if they had not stabbed at it with the oars. What’s that?”
He strained his eyes to watch something which appeared to be crawling along among the blocks of stone close by, but he could not be sure that it was anything alive.
“A stone!” he said, and he went on thinking, not liking to draw attention to what most likely was only imagination. “It would be so stupid,” he said; “and would alarm the brute and keep it from coming, if I was wrong.”
So he sat there, crouched up together, his back against the stone, and his arms round his knees, which formed a resting-place for his chin, till quite a couple of hours of watching and listening to the roar of the wind overhead and the beat of the sea beneath had passed away.
“I wonder how Mr Dallas is,” he thought at last; and as the scene in the rough canvas-covered shelter came to his mind’s eye, with the tallow candle stuck in a corner of the rock, some of its own fat sealing it there, as they had no candlestick, he saw again the sunken cheeks and wild, fevered eyes of the wounded man, and pictured his white, cracked lips, and the tin pannikin of water placed ready on a box by where he lay.
There was some biscuit too, ready to soak and give him a few bits. He thought—“I wonder whether that man has given him any.”