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Updated: May 10, 2025
As for the others, they were like different men, all that day and through the three days that followed. Even Lashman ceased to complain, and, unless their eyes played them a trick, had taken a turn for the better. "I declare, if I don't feel like pitching to sing!" the Snipe announced on the second evening, as much to his own wonder as to theirs.
I warned you I told you he wasn't deep enough. O Lord, have mercy . . . mercy . . . !" He pattered off into a prayer, his voice and teeth chattering. "Hush!" commanded the Gaffer gently; and Lashman choked on a sob. "It ain't bears," Cooney reported, still with his ear to the door. "Leastways . . . we've had bears before. The foxes, maybe . . . let me listen."
The lamplight glinted on the rim of his spectacles and on the silvery hairs in his beard, the slack of which he had tucked under the edge of his blanket. His lips moved as he read, and now and then he broke off to glance mildly at Faed and the Snipe, who were busy beside the fire with a greasy pack of cards; or to listen to the peevish grumbling of Lashman in the bunk below him.
They were Alexander Williamson, of Dundee, better known as The Gaffer; David Faed, also of Dundee; George Lashman, of Cardiff; Long Ede, of Hayle, in Cornwall; Charles Silchester, otherwise The Snipe, of Ratcliff Highway or thereabouts; and Daniel Cooney, shipped at Tromso six weeks before the wreck, an Irish-American by birth and of no known address.
Once he turned northwards and gazed, making a telescope of his hands. He saw nothing, and fell again to his long task. Within the hut the sick man cried softly to himself. Faed, the Snipe, and Cooney slept uneasily, and muttered in their dreams. The Gaffer lay awake, thinking. After Bill, George Lashman; and after George? . . . Who next? And who would be the last the unburied one?
Whenever Lashman broke out into fresh quaverings of self-pity, Cooney's hands opened and shut again, till the nails dug hard into the palm. He groaned at length, exasperated beyond endurance. "Oh, stow it, George! Hang it all, man! . . ." He checked himself, sharp and short: repentant, and rebuked by the silence of the others.
His gaze wandered over their bowed forms "The Gaffer, David Faed, Dan Cooney, the Snipe, and and George Lashman in his bunk, of course and me." But, then, who was the seventh? He began to count. "There's myself Lashman, in his bunk David Faed, the Gaffer, the Snipe, Dan Cooney . . . One, two, three, four well, but that made seven. Then who was the seventh?
Lashman had taken to his bed six weeks before with scurvy, and complained incessantly; and though they hardly knew it, these complaints were wearing his comrades' nerves to fiddle-strings doing the mischief that cold and bitter hard work and the cruel loneliness had hitherto failed to do.
Months later it was June, and even George Lashman had recovered his strength the Snipe came running with news of the whaling fleet. And on the beach, as they watched the vessels come to anchor, Long Ede told the Gaffer his story. "It was a hall a hallu what d'ye call it, I reckon. I was crazed, eh?"
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