"On my soul, on my body—everywhere!"
"Is it a secret, Peter?"
"No, it is not. If you care to hear it, I will tell it you."
"A murder?"
"Worse than that."
"Don't you think you had better not tell it to me? It may place you in danger."
"There is no danger for me. If it were published on the Market Cross, the law could not touch me; besides, most people know it. You would hear it from some one else if not from me."
"It is a short story. When I was only a lad, not quite twenty, I went to sea to seek my fortune. I bound myself as stoker on board a Trieste steamboat. We sailed with a cargo of meal to the Brazils. Our voyage there was prosperous. On our return we took black coffee and wool. On this side of the equator we met a tornado, which broke our engine, smashed our mainmast, and drove the vessel upon a sandbank, where she foundered. Some of the passengers took to the boat; they went only a short way when she upset, and they were all drowned. The rest made a raft from the planks of the sunken ship, and trusted to this frail thing on the open sea. I was one of them. We were in all thirty-nine, including the captain, the steersman, and a merchant from Rio de Janeiro, with his wife and a three-year-old child. We had no other woman or child, for the rest had perished in the open boat. We thought them unfortunate, but now I think they were happy. Better, far better, to have died then. Out of our thirty-nine, soon only nine remained. Oh, how I wish I had been among the dead! For eight days we floated upon the water, the sport of the waves; now buffeted here and there, again in a calm, immovable, nailed as it were to the ocean, without one drop of water to quench our thirst or one morsel of food. Ten of us had died of hunger. For two days we had never eaten, and the ninth day came, and no hope of succor. The sun was burning us up, and the water reflected the heat, so that we lay between two fires. Oh, the horror of that awful time! That evening we took the resolve that one of us should be a victim for the others—that is, that we should draw lots which should be eaten by the others. We threw our names into a hat, and we made the innocent child draw for us. That child drew its own name.
"I cannot tell you, sir, the rest of the ghastly business. Often I dream the whole thing over again, and I always awake at the moment when the miserable mother cursed all those who partook of that horrible meal, invoking heaven that we might never again have peace. At the recollection of her words I spring out of my bed, I run into the woods and wait, to see if I shall be changed into a wolf. It would serve me right.