“Hoist the flag immediately! Close furl the main topsail!” exclaimed the poor wounded man in short jerky sentences, as he sat up there in the swinging cot, with his hands tearing at the bandage that was bound round his head, looking as if he had just risen from the dead, and reminding me of a picture I once saw depicting the raising of Lazarus. His eyes were rolling, too, in wild delirium, and after gazing at us fixedly for a second or two without a sign of recognition on his pallid face, he fell back prostrate again on the mattress, crying out in a pitiful wail, “Alas, for the ship! Too late, too late, too late.”
“Heavens!” said the colonel, turning to Garry. “Can’t you do anything for him?”
“I’ll put somethin’ coolin’ on the dressin’, an’ that’ll make the poor chap’s h’id aisier,” replied the other, suiting the action to the word. “Ice, sure, ’ud be betther; but, faith, there isn’t a morsel aboard!”
Whatever he did apply, however, had a quieting influence, and presently, after tossing from side to side convulsively, Captain Alphonse closed his great staring eyes and began to snore stertorously.
“Heaven be praised!” cried Colonel Vereker. “He’s sleeping again, now!”
“Faith, an’ a good job, too, for him, poor crayture,” said Garry. “He’s in a bad way, I till you, sor! an’ he’d betther die aisy whin he’s about it, sure, than kickin’ up a row that won’t help him.”
“What!” returned the colonel. “Do you think he’s going to die?”
“Begorrah, all the docthers in the worrld wouldn’t save him!”
“My poor friend, my poor friend!” cried the colonel. “I will stay with him then, to the end, so as to soothe his last moments!”
There was evidently a struggle going on in Colonel Vereker’s mind between his desire to do his duty, as he thought, to the dying man, and his natural anxiety to be on deck participating in all the excitement of the chase after the runaway ship and the coming fight with the Haytians, when the black rascals would be called to a final account for all the misery and bloodshed they had caused.