Page:The Iron Pirate 1905.djvu/381

Rh wrung my hand, now another brought clothes, now another hot food; but I stood as one stricken dumb, holding nervously to the taffrail as though none should drag me down again to the horrors of the dinghy, or to that terrible loneliness which had hung over my life for so many weeks. And then there came a great reaction, an overpowering weakness, a great sense of thankfulness, and tears gushed up in my eyes, and fell upon my numbed hands. The good fellows about me, whose German was for the most part unintelligible to me, appreciated well the condition in which I was; and, with many encouraging pats on the back, they forced me down their companion way to the skipper's cabin, and so to a bunk, where I lay inanimate, and deep in sleep for many hours. But I awoke as another man, and when I had taken a great bowl of soup and some wine, my strength seemed to return to me with bounds, and I sat up to find they had taken away my clothes, but that the belt which Black had bound about me lay at the foot of the bunk, and was unopened.

For some minutes I held this belt in my hand with a curious and inexplicable hesitation. It was not heavy, being all of linen finely sewed; but when at last I made up my mind to open it, I did so with my teeth, tearing the threads at the top of it, and so ripping it down. The action was followed by a curious result, for as I opened the seams there fell upon my bed some twenty