“Thank you,” he wrote. “But just think of how much smaller I shall be before I die.”
“And yet I am all here, Hump,” he wrote with a final flourish. “I can think more clearly than ever in my life before. Nothing to disturb me. Concentration is perfect. I am all here and more than here.”
It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man’s body had become his mausoleum. And there, in so strange sepulchre, his spirit fluttered and lived. It would flutter and live till the last line of communication was broken, and after that who was to say how much longer it might continue to flutter and live?
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
“I think my left side is going,” Wolf Larsen wrote, the morning after his attempt to fire the ship. “The numbness is growing. I can hardly move my hand. You will have to speak louder. The last lines are going down.”
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
I was compelled to repeat my question loudly before he answered:
“Not all the time.”
The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and it was with extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl. It was like a “spirit message,” such as are delivered at séances of spiritualists for a dollar admission.
“But I am still here, all here,” the hand scrawled more slowly and painfully than ever.