“Well, go on to tell the story in your own way,” said Mr Meldrum.
Their hunger got so great, the man proceeded to say, that they hunted about for stray ham-bones, and even gnawed the soles of their boots; and at last Bill Moody said they would have to cast lots and sacrifice one of their number for the good of the rest.
“Oh, the dhirty cannibal!” interposed Mr McCarthy. “He’d be quite capable of that; bad cess to the baste!”
There were now only ten of them left, with himself, continued Llewellyn, and he could see that Moody wanted him to be killed, it being all a pretence about casting lots. Some of the men saw through the plot, too, as well as he did and took his part. It was then that a fight came about, and in it he got that slash across his face which they had noticed.
Moody’s own particular adherents amongst the party were only four in number; but they had all got pistols, which the others did not possess; and Llewellyn’s party would probably have got the worst of it had not an awful thing happened.
Just at the moment the fight began, the smoking mountain blew up!
“An eruption of the volcano,” said Mr Meldrum.
The steward did not know anything about that. He explained that, while they were in the midst of the struggle, a lot of fire and stones came down upon them, and Moody and some of the other mutineers were crushed to death outright. The survivors, with himself, then managed to push down the longboat into the sea again, and made off from the terrible place—coasting back along the coast in the hope of coming across one of the settlements of the whaling vessels, which some of them had heard frequented the island.
When they were suffering the last extremities of hunger and thirst—the latter being a fresh privation, for they had had plenty of water to drink on the volcano beach, however much they had wanted food—they saw the flag of the “Penguin Castle” settlers, and made towards it as well as they were able.
“And, thank God, I’m here with you all!” concluded the steward when he had brought his narrative to this point. “I have been saved from a horrible death.”