The Last Entry

by William Clark Russell

'Oh, father!' she cried, trembling violently; then, dropping upon her knees beside him, she began to free his throat. 'He may only be stunned,' she said. 'What is to be done? Shall I bathe his face?'

'If he's only stunned, I allow he'll come to all right, if he's left alone,' said Gordon.

'You'll please to recollect this,' said one of the men: 'he comes rushing along, with a pistol to shoot us with, and the motive was to strike the revolver out of his hand before he could send a second shot. It was him that killed the mate;' and the speaker wheeled on his naked feet, and went to the companion ladder. He was almost immediately followed by the others.

The girl was alone with her dead father. But was he dead? He looked so. Yet the lifeless looks of one in a swoon or in a fit may easily pass as marks of death. She ran to his cabin, and fetched a bowl, into which she splashed cold water from a decanter, and for a quarter of an hour she ceaselessly bathed his face and head. He never stirred. Not the least sigh escaped him. She could not find his pulse, though she sought for it, with trembling fingers, about his wrists. His hands were growing cold, and they lay very dead and heavy in hers, and still she thought, still she hoped, she prayed.

'It may be the same as a fit, or a swoon. He has been stunned. If I sit here patiently, I may see signs of life, and he will come to.'

But, if he should be dead? What would they do with the schooner? What would they do with her? Terrors shook her; they wrenched her heart, and she wrung her hands in agony.

If her father was dead, and she quite understood that Captain Glew and Mr. Tweed were dead, though she but vaguely understood that her father had shot the mate, and that Captain Glew had been assassinated—if he was dead, she was alone in the schooner with eight seamen, who had made outlaws and reckless criminals of themselves by the murders done that morning.

Meanwhile, on deck, the men were quieting down. Their rude, unreasoning passions were paling. Consternation was beginning to work in them. They had gone fearfully and tragically far beyond the unformed wrathful fancies which were in them when they kicked the mess-kids aft, and when the Irishman howled at the sight.

The mate lay dead, with a dark purple hole in his forehead, upon the deck, abreast of the little square of main hatch. Aft, with his head pillowed on the rolled-up ensign, was the corpse of the captain. These were sights, coupled with the thought of the dead man below, to drive the keenest power of realization of what had happened that day into the mind of an idiot, and there was no idiot in that schooner.