twist slowly around till its sides coincided with the sides of the step. Maud made fast and returned to the windlass. Slowly the butt descended the several intervening inches, at the same time slightly twisting again. Again Maud rectified the twist with the watch-tackle, and again she lowered away from the windlass. Square fitted into square. The mast was stepped.
I raised a shout, and she ran down to see. In the yellow lantern light we peered at what we had accomplished. We looked at each other, and our hands felt their way and clasped. The eyes of both of us, I think, were moist with the joy of success.
“It was done so easily after all,” I remarked. “All the work was in the preparation.”
“And all the wonder in the completion,” Maud added. “I can scarcely bring myself to realize that that great mast is really up and in; that you have lifted it from the water, swung it through the air, and deposited it here where it belongs. It is a Titan’s task.”
“And they made themselves many inventions,” I began merrily, then paused to sniff the air.
I looked hastily at the lantern. It was not smoking. Again I sniffed.
“Something is burning,” Maud said, with sudden conviction.
We sprang together for the ladder, but I raced past her to the deck. A dense volume of smoke was pouring out of the steerage companion-way.
“The Wolf is not yet dead,” I muttered to myself as I sprang down through the smoke.
It was so thick in the confined space that I was compelled to feel my way; and so potent was the spell of Wolf Larsen on my imagination, I was quite prepared for the helpless giant to grip my neck in a strangle hold. I hesitated, the desire to race back and up the steps to the deck almost overpowering me. Then I recollected Maud. The vision of her, as I had last seen her, in the lantern light of the schooner’s hold, her brown eyes warm and moist with joy, flashed before me, and I knew that I could not go back.
I was choking and suffocating by the time I reached Wolf Larsen’s bunk. I reached my hand and felt for his. He was lying motionless, but moved slightly at the touch of my hand. I felt over and under his blankets. There was no warmth, no sign of fire. Yet that smoke which blinded me and made me cough and gasp must have a source. I lost my head temporarily and dashed frantically about the steerage. A collision with the table partially knocked the wind from my body and brought me to myself. I reasoned that a helpless man could start a fire only near to where he lay.
I returned to Wolf Larsen’s bunk. There I encountered Maud. How long she had been there in that suffocating atmosphere I could not guess.
“Go up on deck!” I commanded peremptorily.
“But, Humphrey-” she began to protest in a queer, husky voice.
“Please! please!” I shouted at her harshly.
She drew away obediently, and then I thought, What if she cannot find the steps? I started after her, to stop at the foot of the companion-way. Perhaps she had gone up. As I stood there, hesitant, I heard her cry softly:
“Oh, Humphrey, I am lost.”
I found her fumbling at the wall of the after bulkhead, and, half leading her, half carrying her, I took her up the companion-way. The pure air was like nectar. Maud was only faint and dizzy, and I left her lying on the deck when I took my second plunge below.
The source of the smoke must be very close to Wolf Larsen-my mind was made up to this, and I went straight to his bunk. As I felt about among his blankets, something hot fell on the back of my hand. It burned me, and I jerked my hand away. Then I understood. Through the cracks in the bottom of the upper bunk he had set fire to the mattress. He still retained sufficient use of his left arm to do this. The damp straw of the mattress, fired from beneath and denied air, had been smouldering all the while.
As I dragged the mattress out of the bunk it seemed to disintegrate in mid-air, at the same time bursting into flames. I beat out the burning remnants of straw in the bunk, then made a dash for the deck for fresh air.
Several buckets of water sufficed to put out the burning mattress in the middle of the steerage floor; and ten minutes later, when the smoke had fairly cleared, I allowed Maud to come below. Wolf Larsen was unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the fresh air to restore him. We were working over him, however, when he signed for paper and pencil.
“Pray do not interrupt me,” he wrote. “I am smiling.”
“I am still a bit of the ferment, you see,” he wrote a little later.
“I am glad you are as small a bit as you are,” I said.
“Thank you,” he wrote. “But just think of how much smaller I shall be before I die.”
“And yet I am all here, Hump,” he wrote with a final flourish. “I can think more clearly than ever in my life before. Nothing to disturb me. Concentration is perfect. I am all here and more than here.”
It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man’s body had become his mausoleum. And there, in so strange sepulchre, his spirit fluttered and lived. It would flutter and live till the last line of communication was broken, and after that who was to say how much longer it might continue to flutter and live?
CHAPTER XXXVIII
“I think my left side is going,” Wolf Larsen wrote, the morning after his attempt to fire the ship. “The numbness is growing. I can hardly move my hand. You will have to speak louder. The last lines are going down.”
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
I was compelled to repeat my question loudly before he answered:
“Not all the time.”
The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and it was with extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl. It was like a “spirit message,” such as are delivered at seances of spiritualists for a dollar admission.
“But I am still here, all here,” the hand scrawled more slowly and painfully than ever.
The pencil dropped, and we had to replace it in the hand.
“When there is no pain I have perfect peace and quiet. I have never thought so clearly. I can ponder life and death like a Hindoo sage.”
“And immortality?” Maud queried loudly in the ear.
Three times the hand essayed to write but fumbled hopelessly. The pencil fell. In vain we tried to replace it. The fingers could not close on it. Then Maud pressed and held the fingers about the pencil with her own hand and the hand wrote, in large letters, and so slowly that the minutes ticked off to each letter:
“B-O-S-H.”
It was Wolf Larsen’s last word, “bosh,” sceptical and invincible to the end. The arm and hand relaxed. The trunk of the body moved slightly. Then there was no movement. Maud released the hand. The fingers spread slightly, falling apart of their own weight, and the pencil rolled away.
“Do you still hear?” I shouted, holding the fingers and waiting for the single pressure which would signify “Yes.” There was no response. The hand was dead.
“I noticed the lips slightly move,” Maud said.
I repeated the question. The lips moved. She placed the tips of her fingers on them. Again I repeated the question. “Yes,” Maud announced. We looked at each other expectantly.
“What good is it?” I asked. “What can we say now?”
“Oh, ask him-”
She hesitated.
“Ask him something that requires no for an answer,” I suggested. “Then we will know for certainty.”
“Are you hungry?” she cried.
The lips moved under her fingers, and she answered, “Yes.”
“Will you have some beef?” was her next query.
“No,” she announced.
