still green water, beside the body of the coxswain.

I clung with both hands till my nails ached, and I shut my eyes as if to
cover up the peril. Gradually my mind came back again, my pulses quieted
down to a more natural time, and I was once more in possession of
myself.

It was my first thought to pluck forth the dirk, but either it stuck too
hard or my nerve failed me, and I desisted with a violent shudder. Oddly
enough, that very shudder did the business. The knife, in fact, had come
the nearest in the world to missing me altogether; it held me by a mere
pinch of skin, and this the shudder tore away. The blood ran down the
faster, to be sure, but I was my own master again and only tacked to the
mast by my coat and shirt.

These last I broke through with a sudden jerk, and then regained the
deck by the starboard shrouds. For nothing in the world would I have
again ventured, shaken as I was, upon the overhanging port shrouds from
which Israel had so lately fallen.

I went below and did what I could for my wound; it pained me a good deal
and still bled freely, but it was neither deep nor dangerous, nor did it
greatly gall me when I used my arm. Then I looked around me, and as the
ship was now, in a sense, my own, I began to think of clearing it from
its last passenger--the dead man, O'Brien.

He had pitched, as I have said, against the bulwarks, where he lay
like some horrible, ungainly sort of puppet, life-size, indeed, but how
different from life's colour or life's comeliness! In that position
I could easily have my way with him, and as the habit of tragical