"If," he continued, very thoughtful, "you, who have years with you, should live when I go under, you'll take this belt I'm wearing off me; it'll help you ashore. If it happen that I live with you, it'll help both of us."
"We're in the track of steamers," said I; "there's no reason to look at it that way yet. Please God, we'll be seen."
"That's your way, and the right one," he answered; "but I'm not a man like that, and my heart's gone with my ship: we shall never see her like again."
"You built her?" I said questioningly.
"Yes," he responded. "I built her when I put my hand against the world, and, if it happened to me to go through it again, I'd do the same."
"What did you go through?" I asked, as he passed me the biscuits and the cup with liquor in it, and as he sat up in the raft I saw that the man had death written on his face.
But at that time he told me nothing in answer to my question; and sat for many hours motionless, his glassy eyes fixed upon the bottom of the boat. In the afternoon, however, he suddenly sat up, and took up his thread as if he had broken it but a minute before.
"I went through much," said he, gazing over the mirror-like surface of the trackless water-desert, "as boy and man. I lived a life which was hell; God knows it."
I did not press him to tell me more, for in truth I shivered so and was so numbed that even my curiosity to know of this life of crime and of mystery was not so paramount as to banish that other thought: Shall we live when the sun sinks this night? But he found relief in his talk, and, as the liquor warmed him, he continued faster than before—
"I was a stepson, boy; bound to a brute with not as much conscience as a big dog, and no more human nature in him than a wild bull. My mother died three months after he took her, and I'm not going to speak about her, God help me; but if I had the man under my hands that treated her so, I'd crush his skull like I crush this biscuit. Well, that ain't my tale; you ask me what I went through, and I'm trying to tell you. Have you ever wanted a meal? No, I reckon not; and you can't get it in your mind to know what living on bones and bits for more than a couple of years means, can you, as I lived down in my home at Glasgow, and often since out West and at Colorado? I'd come out from Scotland as a bit of a lad not turned thirteen, and I sailed aboard the Savannah City to Montreal, and then to Rio, and in Japan waters; and for three years, until I deserted at 'Frisco, no devilry that human fiends could think of was unknown to me. But they made a sailor of me; and full-rigged ship or steamer I'd navigate with the best of 'em. After that, I went aboard a brig plying between 'Frisco and Yokohama, and there I picked up much, leaving her after two years to get across to Europe, and do the ocean trade with the Jackson line between Southampton and Buenos Ayres. It was in that city I met my wife. I married her in Mendoza; for she came of rich folk, who spat on me, and was only a bit of a girl who'd never wanted a comfort on this earth until that time, and who starved with me then and for years. My God! my whole body burns when I think of it—that bit of a creature who'd never known the lack of a gratification and who was dragged down to every degradation by my curse."