Jack lay back in the hammock, and with wonderful tenderness and feeling sang "Afton Water," repeating the last verse several times over. It was plain that something in it, some phrase or line, had deeply moved him, for he suddenly bent over and laid his face in his hands, shaking with a strange emotion. Tehea rose, and throwing her arms round his neck and forcing away his hands, pressed her lips to his wet eyes. Even as she did so Brady gave the signal for the whole party to move round to the entrance. He passed through first, the others close behind him. Jack leaped to his feet, white and speechless, his wide-open eyes those of an animal at bay. Brady, Winterslea, Stanbury-Jones, Hotham, Hatch, the familiar faces, daunted him like the sight of ghosts. Friends no longer, they were now avengers, with the right to track him down and kill him.
[Illustration: "Jack leaped to his feet, white and speechless."]
The lad took a step back. The girl moaned, and tried to run between Hatch and Stanbury-Jones. The old seaman caught and shook her like a dog, tearing away the whistle she put to her lips and dashing it on the floor. Jack put up his hand and snatched a pistol hidden in the thatch of the roof. Brady, on the instant, leveled his own and thundered out:
"Shoot, and be damned!" returned Jack, and with that he turned his pistol on himself, and, placing the muzzle against his forehead, pulled the trigger.
Before he could try again Brady had caught him round the neck, while Hatch, resigning the girl to Stanbury-Jones, ran in and snapped the handcuffs on his wrists.
"Jack," cried Brady, "we aren't going to hurt you. We're rescuing you from the hill tribes. Man, you're saved!"
"Mind you back us up, old fellow," said Winterslea.
It was some time before Jack could pull himself together. When at last he did so, and began to appreciate the generosity of his captain and shipmates and their astounding concern to save him from the penalty of his crime, he underwent one of those reactions when despair gives way to the maddest gayety. He swore at Hatch, and made him take off the irons; he got out a bottle of white rum and forced them all to drink his health; he kept them in a roar with the story of his adventures, and laughed and cried in turn as he described his life ashore.