“Keep it up, boys!” yelled Mr. Jim Barney in the other boat.
I saw scowling looks exchanged between the twin brothers. It must be true, as Job Perkins had said, the two Barney boys were deadly enemies!
Then suddenly our cox shouted: “In oars! Way all!”
I felt the nose of the boat bump something behind me. I dropped my oar and turned to seize the broken gunwale of the drifting hulk we had pulled so hard to reach. We of the Seamew had won the race.
Chapter XVI
In Which I Return to the Gullwing—and With My Arms Full
I hadn’t breath enough left at first to answer Thankful Polk’s hail. And when my eyes fell upon the contents of the drifting boat that we had pulled so far to reach, what I saw was not calculated to aid me to easy breathing. Lying upon his back, face upwards, in the glare of the morning sun, lay a man, bareheaded and barefooted, dead.
And such an awful death as he must have died! His face was quite black, although he was a white man by nature, it was as though the blood had been congested in his face. His tongue had protruded slightly from between his firm, white teeth. His legs were drawn up as though in a convulsion and the corpse had stiffened that way. His limbs had not been composed by any kindly hand after the spirit had left its body.
He was a sailor. There was tattooing on his chest and arms. He had a short, bushy beard. I believed at first glance that he was a British seaman. And almost at this first moment of glancing into the boat I made another discovery. I learned how the man had died.
His tongue was not black; and although he was much emaciated, neither thirst nor hunger had hounded the sailor to his dreadful end.