Those horrible marks gave me the whole story as fully as though the dead brute aft had recited it to me at large ere I struck him down. He had murdered his mates one after the other to be alone with the gold. It had been murder cold and deliberate, I was sure. There were no signs of a struggle; there were no hints of any previous conflict in the person of the yellow Portuguese. It was as though he had crept behind the men one after another, and struck them down with a chopper. Indeed I was as sure of this as though I had witnessed the deed; and there was the chest of gold in the cabin to explain the reason of it. How he hoped to manage if he fell in with a ship (and I know not what other expectation of coming off with his life he could have formed) it is useless to conjecture. Some plausible tale no doubt he would have taken care to prepare, claiming the gold as his by law of treasure-trove.
I let fall the weapons, and lay over a little strip of bulwark, panting for breath. My eyes were upon the water over the side, but a minute after on directing them at the sea-line, I spied the sails of a ship, a square of pearl glimmering in the blue distance, and slightly leaning from the hot and brilliant breeze gushing fair down upon her starboard beam. Scarce had my mind time to recognize the object as a ship, when it vanished; a reddish gloom boiled up mistlike all about me; the ocean to a mile away from the side of the wreck turned of the deep crimson of blood, spinning round like a teetotum; then followed blackness, and I remember no more....
When consciousness returned I found myself lying in a bunk in a ship’s cabin. The place was familiar to me, and I recollect in a weak way trying to find out why it should be so. “Why, confound it all,” I muttered, “this is my cabin aboard the _Ruby_. God! what a dream it has been!”
“Very glad your senses have returned to you, Mr. Catesby. It’s been a doocid long faint, sir,” exclaimed a familiar voice, and no less a person than the second mate of the _Ruby_ came to my bedside.
A moment after the door opened, and the doctor of the ship entered. I was about to speak; he peremptorily motioned silence, felt my pulse and brow, nodding approvingly; then addressing the mate, thanked him for keeping watch and told him he could go. As my dawning intellects brightened, my eagerness to make sure of the reality of the adventure I had come through grew into a little fever. When I looked round the cabin and saw my clothes hanging upon the bulkhead, my books, the twenty odds and ends of the homely furniture of my berth, I could not but believe that I had fallen ill, been seized perhaps with a fever, and that the incidents of the wreck, the open boat, the murderous Portuguese, were a mere vision of my distempered brain. But for some hours the doctor had his way, would not suffer me to talk, with his own hand brought me broth and wine, and now, finding me strong enough, as I supposed, to support a conversation, went out and in a few minutes returned with Captain Bow.