'I’m going to sleep again, if it is sleep. Anyway, I’m tired. Can you stay up a while?'
'It’s my trick,' consented Jeems.
Neither spoke of the approaching end, but when they had sat staring at each other a time,—for mad men’s minds move with but a mock agility, Zadoc said,—
'Put the second apple under the tin cup in the middle of the raft, and keep it there.'
When the apple was safe, Zadoc held out his right hand.
'Until I wake, Jeems!' he said.
'It is safe there,' was the answer.
And Zadoc lay down on the soggy timbers, satisfied, with faith in the honor of his starving mate.
To Jeems, who watched, the sea looked as never in his life before. For years he had enslaved it. As a tough Mount Desert fisher-boy, he had bound it to his childish will; and in many later years afloat had thrown back its innumerable challenges with all contempt until the Last Time. In sailors' lives, birth and the marriage-day bow down to the Last Time. It always comes, when Fortune or the years have made them blindly bold.
His courage fled before the onslaught of these terrible seas which, high above the level of his blurring eyes, swept up in a torturous parade, as if Death maddened his victims by passing his grand divisions in review.