"Ha!" thinks I to myself. "I do guess what's at t'other end now. Well, well, we will see." Yet, as I so thought, I looked to my priming. I thought it would not be very long ere I should have to shoot these two ruffians, and take my chance of there being more of the same sort on the isle. But the time had not come yet, I did perceive, and meanwhile I lay perfectly snug watching their doings.
A moment after Alderly had gotten the stone and rope up, he threw away the former, and began, with his comrade's assistance, hauling and tugging at it, and presently they got ashore from under the water a long box of about four feet--though 'twas not what I expected to see, namely, the casket. This, I made sure, would have been fished up, but 'twas not. I never did see it again.
'Twas plain to observe there was no more to come, for no sooner was this box up than they made as though they would depart, Alderly letting the rope drop back gently into the water; and then, as I could see by his gestures, making signs to the diver to pick the box up and carry it. But this led to an argument between them; I could observe them shrugging of their shoulders with a drunken gravity, lurching about now and again as they did so, and stumbling against the box more than once; and then, suddenly, I perceived Alderly strike the other in the mouth and knock him down.
"Now," thinks I, "this leads to more things. If they go on like this, there will be only one pirate soon for me to contend with, so far as I know."
Even as I pondered, my words came true. The diver got up, whips out a long knife, and made a rush at the other--the weapon sparkling as though it was dipped in phosphorus in the rays of the moon--and in another moment they had closed together.
But Alderly was the best man of the two--which was perhaps why he was chief of the Etoyle--and ere long he had hold of the other's wrist with one hand and had got him round the body with the other. Then, by degrees, he did bring the body down until it lay across his own knee, face upwards, and having, as I did see, the strength of a bullock, or a vice, he forced the other's arm up and down, directing so his clenched hand that he compelled him to plunge his own dagger into his own breast. Once, twice, thrice, he did it!--the diver screaming with the first plunge of the knife into his bosom, groaning with the second, and with the third making no noise. Then Alderly lets go the diver's fist from out of his own, and frees his own body from his grasp, and down the diver fell to the brink of the river.
"You slew yourself," says he, looking down at him; "'twas your own knife that did it, your own hand that plunged it in." And here he laughed, an awful, blood-curdling laugh. The laugh of a maniac or a fiend! Then he put his foot to the dead man's body and tumbled it over into the river, so that I saw it no more. Next, seizing on to the long box--and nearly falling over it as he did so in his half-drunkenness--he lifted it on to his shoulder and went into the wood. Only, as he departed I saw him also lift up his foot and touch his shoe with his finger, and hold that finger up in the moon to look at; and then he gave again that awful laugh. He was a-laughing at the dead man's blood in which he had trampled!
"Now," says I, "is my time; I will find out if he can also slay me. At any rate he shall not escape without doing so," and with these words I lowered the boat again, got into it and went ashore--the distance from the galliot being not twenty yards. And then, securing of the boat to the trunk of a small tree by the river's brink, I plunged in after him to the wood. Only, you may be sure, I had my pistols with me and my sword.
At first the little wood was so dark that I could not see, or scarce see, the moon a-shining dimly through the thickness--a thickness all made of wild orange, citron, and pomegranate trees, as well as of campeachy trees, and mountain cabbage palms. Yet soon this wood opened out somewhat; there rose before my eyes a little glade, on which the moon did here shine as though on a sweet English field at home, and, reaching this, I perceived by stopping and looking carefully that my man had passed this way. The long grass was all trodden down--nay, so much so, that the two must have also come this way when they set out as comrades--and, since the imprints of the footsteps were most uneven and without regularity, I felt sure my drunken pirate had struggled and staggered along this track.
So across the little glade I went, following ever the irregular crushings down of the grass, until I came to where it was bordered by more thick underbrush and shrub, and then, even had I doubted I was on the steps of Alderly, I could do so no longer. For now through that thick brushwood and tangled growth of briar, and lacery of trailing things, there was crushed aside a most distinct opening through which a man, or men, must have passed, while, had I desired further proofs of where the man had gone whom I sought, it was before me. Lying on the brushwood, catched off and torn by a thorn, was the broken end of Alderly's red feather, the piece that had hung down over his savage face as he forced the diver to slay himself, and that gave, even in that awful moment, an appearance to him of almost comicality. A comicality, though, to cause a shudder!