'Turn out, Jeems,' said Zadoc, when he had worked some life back into his thickening tongue, 'till we put him over.'
They rolled the body into the sea with no words or ceremonials to mark the end, except that Jeems, when some part of the splash stung his face, struck off the drops with trembling, horrified hands.
'Two apples left,' said Zadoc, not in any tentative sounding of possibilities, but with finality forced home by a fact so plain and near as to render evasion needless.
'One for to-day,' said Jeems, 'the—the other one for to-morrow.'
'The last one for to-morrow!' returned Zadoc, bold as ever. 'Let us wait as long as we can before breakfast!'
The raft drifted many hours, following the sun around the fatal, empty bowl. Jeems broke that vast silence.
'Zadoc, I must eat something. My head is—you know—my head!'
'So does mine,' said Zadoc. 'Cut the first apple in two.'
It takes so little to satisfy, when one is starving, and that little goes so very fast! When Zadoc put his furred teeth into half the first apple, it was as if he had not tasted such since he left Cape Cod a dozen years before. His mind, strained with a long, unrealized hope, forgot the timbers on which his bent muscles clung, and went back to an orchard he had known—where such apples always grew. The cool air from the shadows underneath the tree-rows seemed interlaid with waves of heat and the loved odors of the sunlit seaside farm,—that long slope from the meadow land up, up and up beneath the slant uncertain fence to where the white top-sides of the house were vividly set off in green,—till Zadoc came to himself and understood that the smell was only the damp breath of the Atlantic, and the heat the plunging agony which flowed from his own tense heart. The first apple was gone.
The two men’s eyes conversed in brief. Then Zadoc said,—