'Blundell, give me two of your men, and lower that boat. I'll board the brig. I may find something to give us a clue.' 'Put one of the revolvers in your pocket, sir,' said Mr. Blundell. A boat was lowered, and two men and Captain Parry, armed, entered her. All was lifeless aboard the wreck. It would have been ridiculous, then, to suspect an ambush. She had old-fashioned channels, platforms by which her lower rigging was extended and secured to dead-eyes. These platforms remained. The hulk would souse them, hissing, and lift them seething and streaming, but through long intervals they would sway dry with pendulum regularity. 'The main chains will be your only chance, sir,' said one of the seamen. 'Am I to go on board with ye?' 'If you will.' 'Then, Tom, when we're out of it, shove off for God's sake, and keep her clear of them chains. If they come down upon you, your life and the boat ain't worth a drowned cockroach.' Watching his chance with great patience, Captain Parry sprang. He stumbled; but a wild flourish of his arm brought his hand safely to an iron belaying-pin in the rail above. He seized another hard by, and, lifting his knees to the rail, gained the deck. He stood holding on. The peculiar jerky rolling of the hull threatened to throw him, until a minute or two of sympathetic feeling _into_ the life of the fabric should have put some government of it into his legs. The sailor had easily followed. Captain Parry was looking at the forepart of the vessel, which was a horrible litter and muddle of heaped-up timber and smashed caboose, when his companion muttered in his ear in a low growl: 'My God, master, there's a living man!' A living man it was, standing right in the door of the deck-house. He was a seaman, and carried a strange face to those who looked at him, though one might have said he should be familiar enough to anybody belonging to the schooner _Mowbray_. He was James Jones, the boatswain of the yacht. His cheeks were gaunt and grimy, and his eyes blazed in their hollows. His hair lay in streaks over his ears, and down the back of his head, as though to repeated greasy tuggings and pullings. He was without his coat, and his great muscular arms were bare to above the elbow. Captain Parry recoiled a step, thrusting his hand into the pocket where the pistol lay. He suspected this man to be one of the eight, and that the seven would burst out in a minute. 'I'm damned if ye ain't come just in the nick of time!' said Jones; and his grin, and exhibition of yellow fangs, and his dirty skin and flaming eyes, made his face horrible. 'I tell ye what I've just found out. There ain't no death! "How do I know that?" says you. Why, ye see, a man ain't dead till he dies, and when he's dead death ain't got no existence for him. D'ye see it?' said he with an inimitable leer.