"Now," thinks I, "this leads to more things. If they go on like this, there will be only one pirate soon for me to contend with, so far as I know." Even as I pondered, my words came true. The diver got up, whips out a long knife, and made a rush at the other--the weapon sparkling as though it was dipped in phosphorus in the rays of the moon--and in another moment they had closed together. But Alderly was the best man of the two--which was perhaps why he was chief of the _Etoyle_--and ere long he had hold of the other's wrist with one hand and had got him round the body with the other. Then, by degrees, he did bring the body down until it lay across his own knee, face upwards, and having, as I did see, the strength of a bullock, or a vice, he forced the other's arm up and down, directing so his clenched hand that he compelled him to plunge his own dagger into his own breast. Once, twice, thrice, he did it!--the diver screaming with the first plunge of the knife into his bosom, groaning with the second, and with the third making no noise. Then Alderly lets go the diver's fist from out of his own, and frees his own body from his grasp, and down the diver fell to the brink of the river. "You slew yourself," says he, looking down at him; "'twas your own knife that did it, your own hand that plunged it in." And here he laughed, an awful, blood-curdling laugh. The laugh of a maniac or a fiend! Then he put his foot to the dead man's body and tumbled it over into the river, so that I saw it no more. Next, seizing on to the long box--and nearly falling over it as he did so in his half-drunkenness--he lifted it on to his shoulder and went into the wood. Only, as he departed I saw him also lift up his foot and touch his shoe with his finger, and hold that finger up in the moon to look at; and then he gave again that awful laugh. He was a-laughing at the dead man's blood in which he had trampled! "Now," says I, "is my time; I will find out if he can also slay me. At any rate he shall not escape without doing so," and with these words I lowered the boat again, got into it and went ashore--the distance from the galliot being not twenty yards. And then, securing of the boat to the trunk of a small tree by the river's brink, I plunged in after him to the wood. Only, you may be sure, I had my pistols with me and my sword.