The position was a terrible one. Ralegh had been waiting for months, trusting to the loyalty of Keymis to execute his great enterprise; and it was Keymis's very loyalty to Ralegh which was the real cause of his failure; for he would not open the mine unless he was quite sure that his master alone should benefit. Keymis was wrong. But he could not bear Ralegh to think that his conduct had been remiss; he could not bear to think that he had injured the master for whom he would gladly have given his life. Nor could he make Ralegh understand even the reason of his action. "I know then, sir, what course to take," said Keymis, when he found he could not move Ralegh from his attitude of censure, and he went away "out of my cabin into his own, in which he was no sooner entered, but I heard a pistol go off. I sent up to know who had shot a pistol. Keymis himself made answer, lying on his bed, that he had shot it off because it had long been charged, with which I was satisfied. Some half-hour after this, the boy going into his cabin found him dead, having a long knife thrust under his left pap through his heart, and his pistol lying by him, with which it appeared that he had shot himself, but the bullet lighting upon a rib, had but broken the rib, and went no farther." Such was the end of Ralegh's long period of waiting. The tragedy is great and real. He had trusted to Captain Keymis implicitly; and Keymis, through excess of loyalty, had failed him. The only fault in either is that each was a little too true to his own character. Keymis's death shook Ralegh to the depths of his nature. Now more than ever he had need of men staunch as the dead Keymis. For mutiny broke out among the men. Captains Whitney and Wollaston deserted. The men declared that they had joined the expedition merely to loot the Spaniards and plunder they would have. The mine had failed. Well, they would turn pirates and attack the Spanish fleet on its way home. They threatened to throw Ralegh into the sea if he persisted in his resolution to return. He quieted them as much as lay in his power; but at last his great power was shaken and enfeebled, by imprisonment, by long sickness, by age, by the King's treachery, by disaster on disaster. He had still sufficient power to keep to his resolution and to force his men to some semblance of obedience, but in the old days no mutiny would have happened. Sulkily the men set sail for home, and Ralegh knew from the letters which Keymis had brought him from St. Thomas, that he was returning to disgrace and death.