landed upon, and it was sleeping in the boat's bow at the moment, near him; the dog lifted its head as they spoke, eyed the two, and lay down again with a low sort of growl. "Ay," answered the other, "to the last I will--as long as you stick by _me_!" They hauled over the sheet, laid the boat sharp on a wind, and as soon as it was dusk began to pull back toward the island, where they got ashore in the dark before morning. Here Jones stopped, turned suddenly round to the glare of the white water plashing upon the beach, and said no more. "Why, Jones," said I, "is that all you've to tell?--what came of them? For God's sake, yes--what was the upshot?" "'Tis enough to show how one bad thing breeds another, as I said, sir," answered he. "Probably in the end, though--at any rate I only fancy the rest--'tis a horrible dream to me, for a--a--squall came on when that shipmate of mine got so far, and we had to reef topsails. He went overboard off the yard that very night," said Jones wildly. "The man must have been _there_," said I in a pointed way, "to give all the particulars--_he_ was the mate, himself, Mr Jones!" He made no answer, but kept gazing out to sea. "And how long was this ago?" I asked. "Oh," answered he, "years enough ago, no doubt, sir, for both of us to be children, if _you_ were born, Mr Collins"--and he turned his face to me as ghastly as the water toward the horizon he was looking at before,--"at least I hope to God it was so--the man was a poor creature, sir, bless you, and d----d old, as it seems to me--twice my own age at the time, Lieutenant Collins! At all events, though," he went on, rambling in a strange way that made me think he was going out of his mind, "he remembered well enough the first time he saw the white water coming down upon the island. He was hunting--_hunting_--through the bushes and up and down, and came up upon the crag." "Hunting?" I said. "Yes, you didn't know how it lived, or where it kept, but every night it was on the look-out there. There was no one else, save the girl sleeping over beyond in the hut; and the man almost fancied the water of the sea was coming down to the rocks and the beach, like the Almighty himself, to show he was clear of all that had happened--if he could but have finished that brute, testifying like the very devil, he'd have been happy, he felt! Harkye," said he, sinking his voice to a whisper, "when he went back at daylight, the woman was dying--she had born a--what was as innocent as she was, poor, sweet, young heathen!" And if I hadn't guessed pretty well before that Jones was the man he'd been speaking of, his glittering eye, and his stride from the beach would have showed it; apparently he forgot everything besides at that moment, till you'd have thought his mind gloated on this piece of his history. "The woman!" I couldn't help saying, "what woman? Had the rest left you in the boat, then?"