The old fugitive became insane. We only saw his head move; he had covered it over with a bit of sacking to keep the sun’s rays off.
“Forgive me, Cissie—forgive me, Cissie; keep the keys—keep the keys,” he kept saying over and over again in his delirium. The sky was no longer a sky to me, it was a monstrous slab lying over a mighty vault wherein the dead still breathed as they floated and tossed their arms in agony on illimitable waters.
Soogy’s death seemed to revive O’Hara and me; yet we said very little to each other. It was a world of dreams that we stared in, some phantasmagorial existence where only death whispered as the outrigger plopped in the star-mirroring deep around us. O’Hara was no longer my pal in sorrow; we had become rivals in some terrible struggle of will-power. The energy of the whole universe seemed to be wholly concentrated on one vital move on the tremendous chess-board of that phantasmal world of water whereon we drifted. O’Hara and I were the sorrowing slaves of Fate; nothing else existed, only he and I and the dreadful thought as to which one of us must put forth our hand and make that terrible move. It was inevitable that one of us must do it, for on those tropic seas there was no other way than to crawl out on the outrigger and push that small dead form into the vast depths that moved around us. The tropic moon loomed on the horizon. It might have been the uprising sun, for all I knew, in that world of horror that I had been plunged into. I looked over the canoe’s side and gazed into the glassy depths. I saw a great shark gliding along under the surface. It seemed natural that it should be there, waiting for us. I gazed in a languid, interested way as that cannibal of the deep turned softly over on its back and revealed its shining belly. Its cruel, monstrous mouth looked like some materialized jaw of pallid hate as it softly snapped at my shadow that lay in the moonlit deep, and severed it in two! Then O’Hara dissolved into some cobweb-like substance and was blown away on the puff of wind that crept across the hot seas.
Dawn came like a mighty torrent of silver and swept across the silent world of waters. I felt that I was floating across shadow-seas. For a little while I heard a faint moaning and felt cool sea-water slashing over me. I tried to move, but something held my feet down in a merciless grip. It was all the more terrible because I realized in some mysterious way that I was far at sea on that castaway canoe. The fact was, that a breeze had sprung up and the canoe was being tossed wildly to and fro. Why none of us was thrown out is a mystery. Anyhow, the blow was of short duration, for I suddenly lifted my head, and saw O’Hara and the old gentleman lying perfectly still beside me. Then the world seemed to change again: night fell over the sea. Again I watched that silent form lying out on the grating. Again the dawn sent grey wings along the eastern horizon. It was then that I became strangely calm, and, terrible as the sight was, as that child lay dead on the grating of the canoe, I smiled and looked upon it all as the most commonplace of experiences.