WHEN the morning of the sixteenth day broke out from the gray battlements to the east’ard, only two live men remained on the raft which more than two weeks before had left the splintered side of the barkentine; besides, there was one dead man, and his body counted three out of a dozen who had clung to the raft until ten starved to death because they could not live on red apples and brine.

Zadoc roused as much as a man can when every morning he wakens less and less until some day he does not waken at all. Jeems lay staring toward the sun as at a stranger’s face.

“Turn out, Jeems, ” said Zadoc,when he had worked some life back into his thickening tongue, “till we put him over.”

They rolled the body into the sea with no words or ceremonials to mark the end, except that Jeems, when some part of the splash stung his face, struck off the drops with trembling, horrified hands.

“Two apples left,” said Zadoc, not in any tentative sounding of possibilities, but with finality forced home by a fact so plain and near as to render evasion needless.

“One for to-day,” said Jeems, “the — the other one for to-morrow.”

“The last one for to-morrow! ” returned Zadoc, bold as ever. “Let us wait as long as we can before breakfast ! ”

The raft drifted many hours, following the sun around the fatal, empty bowl. Jeems broke that vast silence:

“Zadoc, I must eat something. My head is — you know — my head! ”

“So does mine, ” said Zadoc. “Cut the first apple in two.”

It takes so little to satisfy, when one is starving, and that little goes so very fast! When Zadoc put his furred teeth into half the first apple, it was as if he had not tasted such since he left Cape Cod a dozen years before. His mind, strained with a long, unrealized hope, forgot the timbers on which his bent muscles clung, and went back to an orchard he had known, — where such apples always grew. The cool air from the shadows underneath the tree-rows seemed interlaid with waves of heat and the loved odors of the sunlit seaside farm, — that long slope from the meadow land up, up and up beneath the slant uncertain fence to where the white top-sides of the house were vividly set off in green, — till Zadoc came to himself and understood that the smell was only the damp breath of the Atlantic, and the heat the plunging agony which flowed from his own tense heart. The first apple was gone.

The two men’s eyes conversed in brief. Then Zadoc said: —

“I’m going to sleep again, if it is sleep. Anyway, I ’m tired. Can you stay up awhile ? ”

“It’s my trick,” consented Jeems.

Neither spoke of the approaching end, but when they had sat staring at each other a time, — for mad men’s minds move with but a mock agility, Zadoc said: —

“ Put the second apple under the tin cup in the middle of the raft, and keep it there.”

When the apple was safe, Zadoc held out his right hand.

“Until I wake, Jeems! ” he said.

“It is safe there,” was the answer, and Zadoc lay down on the soggy timbers satisfied with faith in the honor of his starving mate.

To Jeems, who watched, the sea looked as never in his life before. For years he had enslaved it. As a tough Mount Desert fisher boy he had bound it to his childish will, and in many later years afloat had thrown back its innumerable challenges with all contempt until The Last Time. In sailors’ lives, birth and the marriage day bow down to The Last Time. It always comes, when Fortune or the years have made them blindly bold.

His courage fled before the onslaught of these terrible seas which, high above the level of his blurring eyes, swept up in a torturous parade, as if Death maddened his victims by passing his grand divisions in review.

Besides, the pain of hunger so outgrew all reason! It cut through the man’s thin body like the blade of a great and sudden sorrow in one’s heart, through and through, ever returning, never going!

A greater sea than the others rolled underneath the raft and shook the loose boards so that the tin dipper rolled on its inverted rim, and then fell tinkling back again. Jeems crawled to where he could lift the dipper and see beneath. The second apple lay secure, its plump sides a shocking contrast to the terrors of the raft. Jeems looked hard. A cruel pain shot from his throat to his heels in a tearing red-hot spiral. The first apple had so cooled his mouth! Water began running off Jeems’s chin. If he could only run his fingers down those rounding sides, maybe they would catch some of the orchard smell.

Jeems clapped the dipper down with a sudden muscular fury, and kicked Zadoc into sense with such vigor that he fell exhausted from the effort.

“I was so lonesome, I thought I might go off, ” he explained, adding: — “Zadoc, what’s your family? ” “Five and the wife, God help ’em,” said Zadoc, not dramatically either, but just dully, as if it was what his mind had grown to know very much better than anything else. “Have you? ” “No,” said Jeems. “Years ago, I called on a pretty girl over to Somesville, but nothing came of it.”

“Just as well now, ” said Zadoc coldly, adding half in dream, “I recollect all them Somesville girls was pretty. ’Lizabeth come from there.”

“Who? ” asked Jeems.

“’Lizabeth,— the wife, — why, she was your sister, Jeems! ”

“So she was! I forgot! ”

Many madmen speak in the past tense at the stage where they seem to look back on their proper selves.

The sun neared the west.

“Lie down again,” said Jeems, “I’ll watch.”

“Any sail, —that time before? ”

“No sail, Zadoc.”

The wind dropped near night, and Jeems lay on the raft with eyes that glowed back the red reflection of the setting sun. As it moved toward the liquid line of sea, its brilliance fell into the smother of a cloud through which its sides shone with the softened, satin polish of the second apple as Jeems last saw it. The thought struck him in the middle of his heart, which began leaping like when, at nineteen, a girl’s smooth fingers lingered on his own. He hungered for sight of the second apple as for nothing else in the whole of the world before. He wished the raft might roll so violently as to throw off the dipper, and then, before he realized, his own foot had kicked it into the ocean and the apple smiled before him, securely laid between two great planks at the bottom of the raft. Zadoc slept. Jeems was alone with the second apple!

He looked at it between caked lids and let his eyes rove over and over its rare beauties. For the first time since he was born, his whole being — the knotted body whose abundant energies had been quite absorbed by the arduous doings of his roving life, and the big heart of him where the rich red of the blood was pent and packed with never a bit of an outlet for relief — thrilled with the keen, delicious mystery of Desire. His meagre lips, crackling like snake-skin, repeated in monotone as if to hold his conscience under some mesmeric charm: “I must! I must! ”

The mere thought of the cool heart of the fruit made his pulse spring as if whipped. To imagine the exquisite satisfaction which would follow his teeth as they sank slowly, slowly, — sank farther and farther through those moistening walls until at the very acme of delight they met! Christ! He was on it in an instant, holding it with both hands and not lifting it, but just putting his face down and keeping it so in a passionate embrace. He would eat, if he died for it. He must —

“ ’Lizabeth! ” It was Zadoc, dreaming.

“ ’Lizabeth! Good old girl. Good girl. Bye-bye, home at sundown. Good old, good — ah-h-h-h! ”

The voice fell away in an idiotic sigh. Jeems sprang to his feet and stood swaying with the raft, the image of his sister in his eyes. Off east, where the gray shades grew, he saw her walking on the sea, her long hair blown before like a cloud of jet-black flame and her face all lovely.

“’Lizabeth!” Jeems spread his arms, but she did not see him, for she looked at Zadoc as he lay there at her brother’s feet, and her eyes rained love, which calmed the sea like oil.

And then Jeems saw himself as if from far. “’Lizabeth! ” he cried, but she did not hear, so he held his two arms up toward the sky and whispered:

“God, God, God! Forgive Jeems Harbutt, a wicked sinner, — and take him,”—his voice sank to a low, unhuman key, —“and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever — O God! ” And with arms still raised in suppliance for his great unselfish soul, he sprang out backward to the darkening sea.

James Edmund Dunning.