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It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must have been two hours afterward when I picked up with one of her hatch-covers. Thick rain was driving at the time; and it was the merest chance that flung me and the hatch-cover together. A short length of line was trailing from the rope handle; and I knew that I was good for a day, at least, if the sharks did not return.
They had to crowd close together, for their support was only a hatch-cover torn from the ship's deck; but it floated them fairly well and both the girl and the mule knew it would keep them from drowning. The storm was not over, by any means, when the ship went down. Blinding bolts of lightning shot from cloud to cloud and the clamor of deep thunderclaps echoed far over the sea.
The young journalist's interest was aroused, and in that trifling incident lay the salvation of the priest. From that small beginning came the gleam of light that was to illuminate gloriously the darkness of a mistaken life. Chance had capriciously ruled that the hand that had dislocated the Abbe's arm should set it again, and the dead sailor lying on the sticky, tarred hatch-cover had helped.
William Henry Thomas was the last in, having been in the bow setting off a pinwheel, when the blow hit us. We dragged him in. My last memory is of Triplett driving a nail back of the hatch-cover to keep it from sliding. How long we were whirled in that devil's grip of the elements I cannot say. It may have been a day it may have been a week. We were all below, battened down ... tight.
As I learned afterward, he had got the hatch-cover first, and, after some time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it with him, and had been kicked off for his pains. And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love-creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator.
I had frequently built crossways over treacherous swamps. Why not mattress the muddy flat? Standing upon the deck of my boat, I grasped every twig and bough of willow I could reach, and making a mattress of them, about two feet square and a few inches thick, on the surface of the mud at the stern of my craft, I placed upon it the hatch-cover of my boat.
Gaffs and booms were in their places, and the sails furled upon them. The figuration of the main hatch showed a small square, and there was a companion or hatch-cover abaft the mainmast. There was no trace of a boat.
Not twenty feet away from me, on another hatch-cover, were Captain Oudouse and the Heathen. They were fighting over the possession of the cover at least the Frenchman was. "Paien noir!" I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick the Kanaka. Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes except his shoes, and they were heavy brogans.
But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch-cover between us. We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting, while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands. For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water, we drifted over the ocean.
As it passed, Wolf Larsen began to speak, the bare-headed men swaying in unison, to the heave and lunge of the deck. "I only remember one part of the service," he said, "and that is, 'And the body shall be cast into the sea. So cast it in." He ceased speaking. The men holding the hatch-cover seemed perplexed, puzzled no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony. He burst upon them in a fury.
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