“That’s a fearful thing, Andrews,” I exclaimed, returning him the glass. “Of course, we shall go and see what we can do.”
“I have already altered the course two points, sir,” he said.
“Will you send a boat, do you think?”
“Ah, sir, that’s for you to say. If you think it wise that the men should know, remembering what a sailor is, then a boat by all means.”
“That is to be considered. If these poor fellows are really dead——”
“They have been dead many weeks, sir. What’s more, no shipwreck put them in that position.”
“Good God! Do you mean to say that they have been murdered!”
“Ah, that’s not for me to decide, Dr. Fabos. Look at the way they are lashed aboard there. Did their own hands do that? I’ll wager all I’ve got against it. They were tied up like that and then sent adrift. It’s plain enough without the glass, and the glass makes it sure.”
Be it said that we were steaming some fifteen knots an hour by this time, and had come almost within a biscuit toss of the raft. The foreward look-out had been warned to say nothing, and Abel, the quartermaster, took his cue from the officer of the watch. So it came about that we passed by the dreadful spectacle and remained as a crew almost ignorant of it. Indeed, knowing how easily seamen are depressed, I was thankful that it should have been so. The poor fellows upon the raft must have been dead for some weeks. Two of them were little more than human skeletons. The others were washed by every wave that broke over the hellish contrivance of ropes and planks to which they had been tied. I doubted no longer my officer’s supposition, horrible as it was to believe. Neither peril of the sea nor accident of destiny had sent those men to a death unnameable. I knew that they had been foully murdered, and that he who had thus dealt with them was the man I had set out to seek.
“We cannot help them, Andrews,” I exclaimed. “Let us keep our secret. The day may not be distant when the man shall share it with me. It would be something to have lived for—even to avenge that!”