"I slid down by the royal backstay, for while I had no great fellow-feeling for the officers, still, they were my countrymen, and I had no desire to take part in mutiny. Before I reached the deck, however, the fight was over, as far the mates were concerned. They were running aft, for their guns, I suppose, while all but Pango Sam lay stretched out on the deck, and he met me at the rail with murder in his eyes, knowing instinctively, I suppose, that I was not on his side.
"As I jumped to the deck and reached for a belaying pin, he grabbed me. I was utterly helpless in the grasp of that giant. He roared inarticulately, and frothed at the mouth as he lifted me at full length over his head, to dash me to the deck.
"But, as I told you, I merely slid down, to paralyze my crazy bone on hard ice—ice, remember, in the tropics. When I picked myself up Pango Sam was still standing, but dead and stiff, his feet frozen in the ice that covered the deck. Then I saw our passenger flat on his back. He never recovered his reason. His last intelligent speech was given as he fell to the deck, which was about a second or so after I fell myself. While at the wheel, a few days later, I heard the skipper quote it to the mate. It was: 'God have mercy upon my soul!' After that he uttered nothing but gibberish."
Behind us the sound of footsteps came to our ears: but before we could turn, or arise, a voice, fervent and agonized, repeated: "God have mercy upon my soul!" And Old Bill launched headlong between us, and lay unconscious on the floor at the foot of the easel.
"Another spell," said my neighbor. "It was coming to him, I guess. Help me lift him to your couch."
We laid the old fellow on the couch, where he lay with every indication of a fainting spell. But, though we worked over him for a time, he did not come out of it. He did not seem to be in a natural sleep, either, for his breath was too faint, his pulse too irregular. We watched him with growing disquiet for a while, then telephoned to the nearest hospital. Old Bill was taken away, still unconscious, and all we could do was to put him from our minds with the mental reservation that we would visit him.
We did not visit him. Work, engagements, the eternal scramble for money incidental to the life of every man who works for himself, prevented my neighbor and me from getting together for the visit. In a month, however, Old Bill visited us as we sat, discussing my picture; but we hardly recognized him, and, on his part, he did not recognize us at all.
His old face, though still wrinkled and withered, bore an alert, intelligent look far removed from the dull, stupid expression we had known; he was clad in well-fitting garments late from the tailor. He carried a cane, and on his hands were gloves which, as he removed them, showed fingers thick and stubby, but with the unmistakable signs of recent manicuring.
"Pardon me, gentlemen," he said, as he looked us over, "but I have been directed to this studio by an ambulance surgeon as the place from which I was taken in a comatose condition about a month ago. I wakened a few days later with the memories, the consciousness—the ego, I might say—of a young man of twenty-five. Had not that ego been in a good, stable condition I might have gone mad when I saw my old face in a mirror, and realized that I had lost fifty years of my life.
"Since then, however, I have been re-establishing my old connections, and I am now trying to learn what I have been, where I have been, and who I have been. Can you tell me anything? I am, or was once, a Methodist clergyman, named Franklin Mayhew; but I fear that I have forfeited the title of reverend."