Argosy All-Story Weekly, January 21, 1922 — page 26: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

16 days and had apparently been close to starv- ing, though a swifter fate had taken them. The rain, in a way, had helped to preserve them. At least, it had not accomplished what equal hours of sun would have done. Equally it had kept them from the sharks. I had come down without breaking my fast. After looking over those pulped, wrin- kled remnants I did not care for any food, but I went up and got some rubber-soled shoes on, a singlet, and a pair of pants. I did this from some idea of decency and respect before the dead, I imagine, because I didn’t need them otherwise. And, for the first time in several months I wished I had a good slug of brandy. When I came to the lighthouse I left all intoxicants off my list. It was quite a little while before I made up my mind to go down again and carry out the obsequies. But they had to be buried, and it was distinctly up to me to do that and find out what I could about the poor devils. I wasn’t so sorry for them after I got through. They had both committed mur- der. I knocked out the plug and let the boat drain off first of all. There was a nasty-looking knife on the bottom boards, rusted thick. The man in the stern-sheets, an ugly brute with none of death’s soften- ing about his features, had a red club beard and a broken nose. All he wore was a pair of denim pants faded to a blotchy greenish-blue. His feet were naked, and there were no toes on his left foot. It was an old scar and looked as if some one had spaded them neatly off. Just under his floating ribs, on the left-hand side, hidden at first to me by the wrinkles of his bloated carcass, was a knife wound, pallid-lipped and ghastly. The rains had washed away all traces of the blood that had drained out. It was such a wound as might not have killed the man for several hours, but his posture looked like a swift collapse, and I figured that all out presently. When I turned over the body of the second man his face was—horrible! It had been soaking for days, and the death that he had met was not calculated to compose his features. For he had been strangled. The prints of fingers were plain on his ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. putty-colored, corded neck. -Foul play on both sides. For what? The answer lay in that clenched hand sticking up on an arm, the post mortem stiffness of which had been reduced to a wabbly pose, like that of a length of rope held upright. I- almost missed it at first. It was not until I had taken a couple of empty oil-drums and attached them to both pairs of ankles, half filling the drums with water for better weighting; not until I had rowed the remains in their own boat to deep water and was ready to consign them over- board, that I tumbled to the fact there might be something in those stiffened fin- fiers. I was sick, stomach and soul, of the job long before then, but I went at the grisly work determined to go through with all of it, holding that half-stiff arm inboard be- tween my knees while I pried at the tense digits. The sun was bright above us, and as I managed to part the second and third fin- gers, I got a flash of something so fiercely crimson that I let go the dead hand. It was a jewel, and no ordinary jewel. The tragedy that had been enacted flashed before me. The throttled man had possessed the knife, or got possession of it, while the other drowsed. He had sprung and stabbed, low- er than he had meant, perhaps. I think he must have held the gem, but had been afraid of the red-bearded one, much the more powerful man of the two. Perhaps he merely hated to share the proceeds. And then, despite his wound and swiftly ebbing strength, the red-bearded one had flung himself upon the other, choked him -sense- less, taken the gem and fallen back in his own last convulsion. The other, tumbled face-downward, unconscious, in the bilge, must have drowned unless the life had not been actually choked out of him. I worked out the jewel with a thole-pin at last, and for a moment its blazing beauty lay on the palm of my hand. Then I thrust it into my pocket, anxious to get rid of my company. I had been muddling over in my mind what sort of prayer I might say, thinking it hardly right to release them to the sharks without some ritual. But now I gave up that idea, got one drum at comiclboooks C©