We had breakfasted, and were lying on the deck chatting and reading, as the Leonora glided over the heaving bosom of the main—the sun shining—the seabirds sailing athwart our course with outstretched, moveless wings—the sparkling waters reflecting a thousand prismatic colours, as the brig swiftly sped along her course—all nature gaily bright, joyous, and unheeding. Suddenly one of the wounded men, Henry Stephens by name, raised himself from his mat with a cry so wild and unearthly that half the crew and people started to their feet.
"My God!" he exclaimed, as he sank down again upon his mat, "I'm a dead man—those infernal arrows."
"Poor Harry!" said Nellie, who by this time was bending over him, "don't give in—by and by better—you get down to bunk. Carry him down, you boys!"
Two of the crew lifted the poor fellow, who even as they raised him had another fearful paroxysm, drawing his frame together almost double, so that the men could scarcely retain their hold.
"Carry him gently, boys!" said Hayston; "go to the steward for some brandy and laudanum, that will ease the pain."
"And is there no cure—no means of stopping this awful agony?"
"Not when tetanus once sets in," said Hayston; "it's not the first case I've seen."
The other man was quite a young fellow, and famed among us for his entire want of fear upon each and every occasion. He laughed and joked the whole time of the fight with the Santa Cruz islanders, said that every bullet had its billet, and that his time had not come. "He believed," he said, "also that half the talk about death by poisoned arrows was fancy. Men got nervous, and frightened themselves to death." He was not one of that sort anyhow. He had laughed and joked with both of us, and even now, when poor Harry Stephens was carried below, and we could hear his cries as the increasing torture of the paroxysms overcame his courage and self-control, he joked still.
The day was a sad one. Still the brig glided on through the azure waveless deep—still the tropic birds hung motionless above us—still the breeze whispered through our swelling sails, until the soft, brief twilight of the tropic eve stole upon us, and the stars trembled one by one in the dusky azure, so soon to be "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
"Reckon I've euchred the bloodthirsty niggers this time," said Dick, with a careless laugh, lighting his pipe as he spoke. "This is 'Twelfth night.' That's the end of the time the cussed poison takes to ripen, isn't it, Nellie?" he laughed. "It regular puts me in mind of old Christmas days in England, and us schoolboys counting the days after the New Year! What a jolly time it was! Won't I be glad to see the snow, and the bare hedges, and the holly berries, and the village church again? Dashed if I don't stay there next time I get a chance, and cut this darned slaving, privateering life. I'll—oh! my God—ah—a—h!"