I listened--it came
again--once--twice--and then all was silence. He was dead, and I
realised in the sudden stillness that had come upon the room that I was
alone. Yet he had passed away so quietly after his fitful fever that I
could not bring myself to believe that he was really gone, and I stood
looking at the body, fearing to convince myself of the truth by touching
it.
So entranced was I by that feeling of awe which comes to almost every
one in the presence of death, that I did not hear the shouting of the
hammock-boy outside, or the footsteps of a white man coming into
the room; and not until he touched me on the shoulder did I turn and
recognise the sallow face of the Portuguese doctor whom I had sent for,
and who had thus arrived too late. However, he served to help me to bury
the mortal part of Jackson in the little graveyard beside the body of
his wife and that of the man who had come between them when alive. And
such was without doubt the fact; for when the doctor had gone, and I
was alone again, I collected and made an inventory of the dead men's
effects, and in Jackson's desk I found his diary, or, as he himself
would have called it, his log; and in that log was noted, on the very
day that Bransome had arrived on the Point, his suspicion of the man,
and later on his conviction that Bransome was indeed he who had injured
him.
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