But I was wet through; and now that we were safe, the vessel sliding with swiftness through the clear shadow of the night, and my shipmate Louise tranquil in the full realisation of our sudden and complete deliverance, I could find leisure to feel a little chilly. So, leaving her with a promise that I should shortly return, and telling Wetherly to keep the barque steady as she was going, I picked up the cabin lamp, that was still feebly burning upon the deck, and descended the companion steps. I paused to look around me upon the familiar interior in which Miss Temple and I had passed so many hours of distress and wretchedness with an exclamation of gratitude to God for his merciful preservation of us, and then went to my cabin to habit myself in such dry garments as I might find in Captain Braine’s locker. I opened the door, but recoiled with an involuntary cry. I had forgotten Forrest! and there lay the dead body of the man right in front of me. Twice, now, had that little square of carpet been stained by human blood. I was horribly shocked by the spectacle of the corpse; but it was necessary that I should change my clothes, and I had to undergo the torture of being watched by those half-closed ghastly eyes, to which twenty expressions of life were imparted by the stirring of the dim flame in the lantern whilst I sought for and attired myself in dry apparel. This done, I made a brighter flame, and then held the light to the dead face, that I might be sure the villain had no life in him. No gibbeted body that had been swinging in chains for a month could be deader. I entered the cuddy, hung up the lamp, and went on deck.
‘Miss Temple,’ I exclaimed, ‘will you kindly hold the wheel for a few minutes?’
She rose and grasped the spokes. Wetherly understood me, and followed me below in silence.
‘We must toss the body overboard,’ said I; ‘there can be no luck for the ship with such an object as that as a part of her freight, and Miss Temple must be helped to forget the horror of the night that’s going.’
Between us we picked up the corpse, very quickly conveyed it through the companion hatch, went forward with it where the darkness lay heavy, and dropped it over the bulwarks.
‘That’s how they would have served you, sir,’ said Wetherly.
‘And you,’ said I.
‘Yes, my God, I know it!’ he answered in a voice of agitation.
We returned to the wheel, which Wetherly took from Miss Temple, who seated herself with me just behind it on the gratings, and there we held a council. Our business must be to get to a port as soon as possible. Should we head away for the Islands of the Low Archipelago, bearing north-west with a chance of falling in with a vessel cruising amongst them who would lend us two or three men to help us in navigating the barque, or should we steer a due east course for Valparaiso, that lay about two thousand six hundred miles distant?
Our resolution was rapidly formed. The islands might yield us no help; there was also the risk of running ashore upon the hundred reefs of that then little known navigation; abundance of the natives of the groups were man-eaters, and we certainly had not delivered ourselves from the perils we ran through enforced association with the carpenter and his crew merely to ingloriously terminate our adventures by serving to appease the appetite of a little population of blacks.