“Feeling if there isn’t a piece of ship’s bread in his pockets,” answered the man doggedly, and looking up with a wolfish light in his sunken eyes. “Let him alone!” said Holdsworth. The man dragged himself away reluctantly, grumbling to himself, and resumed his place near the mast, keeping his eye steadfastly fixed on the dead body. A sick shudder passed through Holdsworth as he observed the man’s peculiar stare, and sinking on his knees, he uncovered the child’s face and inspected it attentively, to satisfy himself that he was actually dead. He then raised him in his arms with the intention of casting him overboard. But Johnson came scrambling over to him and gripped him by the wrist. The expression of his face, made devilish by suffering, was heightened to the horribly grotesque by the action of his mouth, which gaped and contorted ere he could articulate. “What are you going to do? Keep him!” he exclaimed. “Why?” answered Holdsworth, looking him full in the face. But the man could not deliver the idea that was in his mind; he could only _look_ it. Holdsworth turned his back upon him and raised his burden on a level with the boat’s gunwale, but Johnson grasped the body with both hands. “Let go!” said Holdsworth. The man with an oath retained his hold. Weak as Holdsworth was, the passion that boiled in him at the desecration the half-maddened wretch was doing his poor little favourite, gave him temporarily back his old strength. He raised his foot, and, planting it in Johnson’s chest hurled him back; the man fell with a crash over the thwart, and lay stunned. Holdsworth leaned over the boat’s side and let the body gently sink in the water; which done, he felt that his own turn was come, and dropped in the stern-sheets groaning, with drops in his eyes that scalded them. But he still lived, and whilst his heart beat nature would assert herself. Towards the afternoon a torturing craving for food beset him, started him into life, and made him sit upright. He wiped the foam from his lips and beheld it discoloured with blood. He looked savagely around him like a wild beast, and, beholding nothing but the dry, bare seats, the boat’s hot interior with the gratings whitened by the heat of the sun, and underneath them the glistening water that bubbled coolly and with a maddening suggestion of sparkling, refreshing springs, he dragged his knife from his pocket, pierced his arm, and put his lips to the wound. * * * * * CHAPTER XIII. THE TENTH DAY. It was morning on the tenth day, dating from the foundering of the “Meteor.” A barque of about six hundred tons, named the “Jessie Maxwell,” three weeks out from the port of Glasgow, having been becalmed all night, was standing south, with all sail set, and a gentle breeze on the beam.