At the word my men rowed in, and the sailor in the bow, as he grasped the gunwale of the canoe, uttered a startled cry.
“What is it?” I asked.
Without reply he drew the canoe alongside our boat, and we could all see the form of a man lying flat upon his face on the rough bottom.
CHAPTER VI
THE DEAD MAN’S STORY
“Turn him over, Tom,” said I, softly, and the sailor clambered into the canoe and obeyed—rather gingerly, though, for no one likes to touch a dead man.
The bearded face and staring eyes that confronted us were those of one of our own race, a white man who had been shot through the heart with an arrow that still projected from the wound. His clothing was threadbare and hung almost in rags, while his feet were protected by rude sandals of bark laced with thongs of some vegetable fibre. He was neither a Mexican nor a Spaniard, but I judged him a North American of German descent, if his physiognomy could be trusted.
The man had not long been dead, that was quite evident, and the arrow that had pierced his heart must have killed him instantly. I pulled out the weapon and found it of skillful construction,—a head of hammered bronze fastened to a shaft most delicately shaped and of a wood that resembled yew. It differed materially from any Indian arrow I had ever before seen.
The mystery of this man’s life and death seemed impenetrable, and I ordered the canoe attached to our stern and towed it in our wake down to the ship.
A sailor’s burial ground is the sea; so I decided to sew the corpse in sacking, weight it heavily, and sink it in the deepest water of the river.
Before doing this one of the men searched the pockets of the tattered clothing and drew out a small book that looked like a diary, a pocketknife, several bits of lead-pencil and a roll of thin bark tied with wisps of the same material.