Prendergast, and the second mate was his right-hand man. The captain,
the two mates, two warders Lieutenant Martin, his eighteen soldiers,
and the doctor were all that we had against us. Yet, safe as it was,
we determined to neglect no precaution, and to make our attack
suddenly by night. It came, however, more quickly than we expected,
and in this way.
"'One evening, about the third week after our start, the doctor had
come down to see one of the prisoners who was ill, and putting his
hand down on the bottom of his bunk he felt the outline of the
pistols. If he had been silent he might have blown the whole thing,
but he was a nervous little chap, so he gave a cry of surprise and
turned so pale that the man knew what was up in an instant and seized
him. He was gagged before he could give the alarm, and tied down upon
the bed. He had unlocked the door that led to the deck, and we were
through it in a rush. The two sentries were shot down, and so was a
corporal who came running to see what was the matter. There were two
more soldiers at the door of the state-room, and their muskets seemed
not to be loaded, for they never fired upon us, and they were shot
while trying to fix their bayonets. Then we rushed on into the
captain's cabin, but as we pushed open the door there was an
explosion from within, and there he lay with his brains smeared over
the chart of the Atlantic which was pinned upon the table, while the
chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand at his elbow. The
two mates had both been seized by the crew, and the whole business
seemed to be settled.
"'The state-room was next the cabin, and we flocked in there and
flopped down on the settees, all speaking together, for we were just
mad with the feeling that we were free once more. There were lockers
all round, and Wilson, the sham chaplain, knocked one of them in, and
pulled out a dozen of brown sherry. We cracked off the necks of the
bottles, poured the stuff out into tumblers, and were just tossing
them off, when in an instant without warning there came the roar of
muskets in our ears, and the saloon was so full of smoke that we
could not see across the table. When it cleared again the place was a
shambles. Wilson and eight others were wriggling on the top of each
other on the floor, and the blood and the brown sherry on that table
turn me sick now when I think of it. We were so cowed by the sight
that I think we should have given the job up if had not been for
Prendergast. He bellowed like a bull and rushed for the door with all
that were left alive at his heels. Out we ran, and there on the poop
were the lieutenent and ten of his men. The swing skylights above the
saloon table had been a bit open, and they had fired on us through
the slit. We got on them before they could load, and they stood to
it like men; but we had the upper hand of them, and in five minutes
it was all over. My God! Was there ever a slaughter-house like that
ship! Predergast was like a raging devil, and he picked the soldiers
up as if they had been children and threw them overboard alive or
dead. There was one sergeant that was horribly wounded and yet kept
on swimming for a surprising time, until some one in mercy blew out
his brains. When the fighting was over there was no one left of our
enemies except just the warders the mates, and the doctor.
"'It was over them that the great quarrel arose. There were many of
us who were glad enough to win back our freedom, and yet who had no
wish to have murder on our souls. It was one thing to knock the
soldiers over with their muskets in their hands, and it was another
to stand by while men were being killed in cold blood. Eight of us,
five convicts and three sailors, said that we would not see it done.
But there was no moving Predergast and those who were with him. Our
only chance of safety lay in making a clean job of it, said he, and
he would not leave a tongue with power to wag in a witness-box. It
nearly came to our sharing the fate of the prisoners, but at last he
said that if we wished we might take a boat and go. We jumped at the
offer, for we were already sick of these blookthirsty doings, and we
saw that there would be worse before it was done. We were given a
suit of sailor togs each, a barrel of water, two casks, one of junk
and one of biscuits, and a compass. Prendergast threw us over a
chart, told us that we were shipwrecked mariners whose ship had
foundered in Lat. 15?and Long. 25?west, and then cut the painter
and let us go.
"'And now I come to the most surprising part of my story, my dear
son. The seamen had hauled the fore-yard aback during the rising, but
now as we left them they brought it square again, and as there was a
light wind from the north and east the bark began to draw slowly away
from us. Our boat lay, rising and falling, upon the long, smooth
rollers, and Evans and I, who were the most educated of the party,
were sitting in the sheets working out our position and planning what
coast we should make for. It was a nice question, for the Cape de
Verds were about five hundred miles to the north of us, and the
African coast about seven hundred to the east. On the whole, as the
wind was coming round to the north, we thought that Sierra Leone
might be best, and turned our head in that direction, the bark being
at that time nearly hull down on our starboard quarter. Suddenly as
we looked at her we saw a dense black cloud of smoke shoot up from
her, which hung like a monstrous tree upon the sky line. A few
seconds later a roar like thunder burst upon our ears, and as the
smoke thinned away there was no sign left of the Gloria Scott. In an
instant we swept the boat's head round again and pulled with all our
strength for the place where the haze still trailing over the water
marked the scene of this catastrophe.
"'It was a long hour before we reached it, and at first we feared
that we had come too late to save any one. A splintered boat and a
number of crates and fragments of spars rising and falling on the
waves showed us where the vessel had foundered; but there was no sign
of life, and we had turned away in despair when we heard a cry for
help, and saw at some distance a piece of wreckage with a man lying
stretched across it. When we pulled him aboard the boat he proved to
be a young seaman of the name of Hudson, who was so burned and
exhausted that he could give us no account of what had happened until
the following morning.
"'It seemed that after we had left, Prendergast and his gang had
proceeded to put to death the five remaining prisoners. The two
warders had been shot and thrown overboard, and so also had the third
mate. Prendergast then descended into the 'tween-decks and with his
own hands cut the throat of the unfortunate surgeon. There only
remained the first mate, who was a bold and active man. When he saw
the convict approaching him with the bloody knife in his hand he
kicked off his bonds, which he had somehow contrived to loosen, and
rushing down the deck he plunged into the after-hold. A dozen
convicts, who descended with their pistols in search of him, found
him with a match-box in his hand seated beside an open powder-barrel,
which was one of a hundred carried on board, and swearing that he
would blow all hands up if he were in any way molested. An instant
later the explosion occurred, though Hudson thought it was caused by
the misdirected bullet of one of the convicts rather than the mate's
match. Be the cause what I may, it was the end of the Gloria Scott
and of the rabble who held command of her.
"'Such, in a few words, my dear boy, is the history of this terrible
business in which I was involved. Next day we were picked up by the
brig Hotspur, bound for Australia, whose captain found no difficulty
in believing that we were the survivors of a passenger ship which had
foundered. The transport ship Gloria Scott was set down by the
Admiralty as being lost at sea, and no word has ever leaked out as to
her true fate. After an excellent voyage the Hotspur landed us at
Sydney, where Evans and I changed our names and made our way to the
diggings, where, among the crowds who were gathered from all nations,
we had no difficulty in losing our former identities. The rest I need
not relate. We prospered, we traveled, we came back as rich colonials
to England, and we bought country estates. For more than twenty years
we have led peaceful and useful lives, and we hoped that our past was
forever buried. Imagine, then, my feelings when in the seaman who
came to us I recognized instantly the man who had been picked off the
wreck. He had tracked us down somehow, and had set himself to live
upon our fears. You will understand now how it was that I strove to
keep the peace with him, and you will in some measure sympathize with
me in the fears which fill me, now that he has gone from me to his
other victim with threats upon his tongue.'
"Underneath is written in a hand so shaky as to be hardly legible,
'Beddoes writes in cipher to say H. has told all. Sweet Lord, have
mercy on our souls!'
"That was the narrative which I read that night to young Trevor, and
I think, Watson, that under the circumstances it was a dramatic one.
The good fellow was heart-broken at it, and went out to the Terai tea
planting, where I hear that he is doing well. As to the sailor and
Beddoes, neither of them was ever heard of again after that day on
which the letter of warning was written. They both disappeared
utterly and completely. No complaint had been lodged with he police,
so that Beddoes had mistaken a threat for a deed. Hudson had been
seen lurking about, and it was believed by the police that he had
done away with Beddoes and had fled. For myself I believe that the
truth was exactly the opposite. I think that it is most probable that
Beddoes, pushed to desperation and believing himself to have been
already betrayed, had revenged himself upon Hudson, and had fled from
the country with as much money as he could lay his hands on. Those
are the facts of the case, Doctor, and if they are of any use to your
collection, I am sure that they are very heartily at your service."
THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL
An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend
Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was
the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he
affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in
his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a
fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional
in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan,
coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made
me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a
limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the
coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and
his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the
very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself
virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should
be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his
queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a
hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with
a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither
the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics
which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning
up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places. But his
papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents,
especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it
was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to
docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these
incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he
performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were
followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about
with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to
the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every
corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were
on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by
their owner. One winter's night, as we sat together by the fire, I
ventured to suggest to him that, as he had finished pasting extracts
into his common-place book, he might employ the next two hours in
making our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the
justice of my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to
his bedroom, from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box
behind him. This he placed in the middle of the floor and, squatting
down upon a stool in front of it, he threw back the lid. I could see
that it was already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red
tape into separate packages.
"There are cases enough here, Watson," said he, looking at me with
