‘And what does he say?’
‘He has nothing to say, sir. How should he remember, Captain Keeling? He fell to the blow as an ox would.’
‘Ha!’ cried the skipper; ‘but does he recollect seeing anybody lurking near him—has he any suspicion’——
‘Sir,’ answered the doctor, ‘at the present moment his mind has but half an eye open.’
I made one of the crowd that had assembled to hear the doctor’s report, and stood near the binnacle stand—close enough to it, in fact, to be able to lay my hand upon the hood. My eye was travelling from the ugly patch that had an appearance as of still sifting out upon the white plank within half a yard of me, when I caught sight of a black lump of something just showing in the curve of the base of the binnacle stand betwixt the starboard legs of it. It was gone in a moment with the slipping off it of the streak of moonshine that had disclosed it to me. Almost mechanically, whilst I continued to listen to the doctor, I put my toe to the thing; then, still in a mechanical way, picked it up. It was a large stone, something of the shape of a comb, with a twist in the middle of it, and of a smooth surface on top, but rugged and broken underneath, with a length of about five inches jagged into an edge as keen as a flint splinter. It was extraordinarily heavy, and might in that quality have been a lump of gold.
‘Hallo!’ I cried, ‘what have we here?’ and I held it to the glass of the binnacle to view it by the lamplight.
‘What is that you are looking at, Mr. Dugdale?’ called out old Keeling.
‘Why,’ said I, ‘neither more nor less to my mind than the weapon with which your sailor has been laid low, captain.’
There was a rush to look at it. Keeling held it up to the moonlight, then poised it in his hand.
‘Who could have been the ruffian that hove it?’ he cried.