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Updated: May 31, 2025
Of course, any officer who respects himself will do what he can to pick a man up, if the weather is not so heavy that he would have to risk his ship; but I don't think I remember seeing a man come back when he was once fairly gone more than two or three times in all my life, though we have often picked up the life-buoy, and sometimes the fellow's cap.
I think my mind must have slowly gone out of me, leaving me another person. I remember a few sensations and it only seems like a week ago to me one, of being alone on the surface of the sea at night, supported by the life-buoy; and then, I seemed to be back among the rats, but that was just as I wakened on your floor here.
In choking sobs and gasps his breath came and went, while he paddled with hands and feet, glad of his reprieve; and when his lungs worked normally, he struck out for a white, circular life-buoy, not six feet away. "Bless her for this," he prayed, as he slipped it under his arms. His oilskin trousers were cumbersome, and with a little trouble he shed them.
Thus it is through life; there seems ever to accompany dullness a sustaining power of vanity, that like a life-buoy, keeps a mass afloat whose weight unassisted would sink into obscurity.
The life-buoy a long slender cask was dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
"I felt myself going, and flung out my hands to save myself naterally, and by that means I managed to get hold of the becket of the life-buoy, which in course broke adrift from the boom, and came overboard with me. "Well, I didn't seem to know where I was or what I was doin' for a minute or two; and then the cold water revived me.
"Just so, I'm the man that you hauled so violently out of the cabin of the wreck last week, and shoved so unceremoniously into the life-buoy, and I have sent for you, first, to thank you for saving my life, because they tell me that, but for your swimming off with a rope, we should certainly have all been lost; and, secondly, to offer you aid in any course of life you may wish to adopt, for I have been informed that you are not at present engaged in any special employment."
The next moment the strong current had hurried the buoyant safeguard far away. A red tarboosh followed the life-buoy, floating near it on the surface. . . . . . Ali Nedjar was gone! drowned! He never rose again. . . . I was dreadfully shocked at the loss of my good soldier he had been much beloved by us all. We could hardly believe that he was really gone for ever.
And now, I feel that weak and done up, that a child might pitch me overboard ag'in, if he was so minded, I do believe." The life-buoy came aboard again with Bob; so I unshipped the signal- staff and took it to pieces, made it up in a bundle once more, stopped it to the buoy, and slung the buoy itself in its old position on the boom.
The sight of his colorless and unhappy face with that indescribable homeless-dog look in his eyes was too much for me. I gave up. I hugged his head to my breast-bone as though it were my only life-buoy in an empty and endless Atlantic and only stopped when I had to rub the end of my nose, which I couldn't keep a collection of several big tears from tickling.
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