I did as he bid me; he ran a great risk of being shot. The mate turned on O'Carroll with an oath, and the captain snapped his pistol at me, but fortunately he had already discharged it, and in another instant I brought him, as he attempted to grapple with me, to the ground. O'Carroll had mastered the mate, and the other men stood staring at us, but offering no opposition. "Is this the way for men to behave who have just been saved from death, to make yourselves worse than the brute beasts? This--this is the cause of it!" exclaimed O'Carroll, kicking a cask from which a stream of spirit was even then running out. "It would have been no loss to us if you had killed each other, but we could not see our fellow-creatures perish without trying to save them." The bold and determined tone in which O'Carroll spoke, aided by the arrival of the rest of our friends, had such an effect on the seamen, that those who were still able to move slunk away to a distance, while the captain and his mate, when we let them go, sat down helplessly on the sand, forgetting entirely their quarrel and its cause. There they sat, laughing stupidly at each other, as if the affair had been a good joke. While O'Carroll was emptying the rum cask, which it appeared had been washed on shore and secreted by the captain, his men went to the wounded man. He did not speak: he seemed scarcely to breathe. I took his hand: it was already cold. All this time he had been bleeding to death: an artery had been shot through. We did our best in the dark to bind up the wound and stop the bleeding; the spirit which might have kept his heart beating till nature, in her laboratory, had formed more blood, was gone; indeed, probably in his then condition it would not have had its due effect. The wretched man's breath came fainter and fainter. There was no restorative that we could think of to be procured. We lifted him up to carry him to the camp, but before we had gone many paces, we found that we were bearing a corpse. "That man has been murdered," exclaimed O'Carroll, turning to the captain. "By whose hand the shot was fired which killed him I know not, but I do know that his blood is on the head of the man who ought to have set a good example to his inferiors, and prevented them from broaching the cask they had found."