noon
Sitting there with the splotches of fresh blood on the deck all around me was more than I could stomach for very long . The sight of them brought back to me with a horrid distinctness everything that I had seen since I came aboard the hulk : the dead man lying on the deck , the other man with his frightful wounds and his wild talk and his death in the midst of his passionate ravings , and the disgusting work that I had been forced to do before I could hide their two bodies from my sight in the sea-depths beneath the tangled weed . And so , presently , I scrambled to my feet , thinking to get back to the _ Hurst Castle _ again -- where there was no taint of blood to bring up haunting visions and where , though it seemed a long while past to me , I had been in the company of honest and kindly men . But when I turned toward this poor escape from my misery -- which at best was but a change from a foul prison to a clean one -- I saw that I could not easily compass it ; for in the time that had passed since I had made my jump in the morning -- noon being by then upon me -- the _ Hurst Castle _ had swung around a little , being caught I suppose upon some bit of sunken wreckage , so that where the two ships were nearest to each other there was an open reach of twenty feet or more across the weed . This was too great a distance for a jump , seeing that it must be made from rail to rail without a run to give me a send-off ; and yet it was so short that my not being able to cross it never even entered my mind . Had there been a mast standing on the hulk , with a yard fast to it , I could have rigged a rope from the yard-arm and swung myself across in a moment ; but the decks being sea-swept , with nothing left standing on them , that way was not open to me ; nor could I find a light spar -- even the flag-staff at the stern being snapt away -- that I could stretch across from one rail to the other and make a bridge of . The only other thing that occurred to me was to tear off some of the doors in the cabin and to make of them a little raft that I could pass by , though I saw well enough that pushing a raft through so dense a tangle even for that short distance would be a hard job .