dear to her,” said the Second Officer, with a little 11tremble in his voice, “but she only smiled—a worn kind of smile—and said that duty must be considered first. I won’t deny it,” said the Second Officer, openly producing a very white pocket-handkerchief and unfolding it. “I kissed that woman’s hand as though she had been the Queen.” He concealed his face with the handkerchief and coughed rather loudly.

11

“The Rude Shellback Touched to the Quick,” wrote the Pressman. “He Sheds Tears.” “Get on with the death-scene, sir, if you don’t object!” he said, breathing through his nose excitedly. “If that elephant asked for a minister, I’d not be surprised!”

“He did make his will, after a fashion,” said the narrator. “You see, during the convulsive struggles I have described, when he broke off his right tusk—didn’t I mention that?”

“No!” denied the Pressman.

“He broke it, anyhow, right off short, as a boy might snap a carrot,” said the Second Officer. “There it lay, among the litter, in the bottom of his cage. He had suddenly ceased trumpeting, and a deathly silence had fallen on all creation, one would have said. The vessel still rolled a bit, but the wind had fallen, and the sun was going down like a blot of fire, on the——”

“Western horizon,” wrote the Pressman.

“Nurse Amy, from her ladder, still rendered the last offices of human kindness to the sinking animal, sponging his forehead with ice-water and fanning him with a bellows. As she whispered to me that the end was near, Bingo opened his eyes. With an expiring effort he lifted the broken tusk from the bottom of the cage, dropped it on the deck at his faithful Nurse’s feet, uttered a heavy groan, threw up his trunk, sank gently forward upon his massive knees, and died!”

“The editor of the opposition paper will do another die when he runs his eye over the Yeller to-morrow 12morning,” said the Pressman, joyfully smacking the rubber band round the filled notebook. “And the port-rail got carried away when you yanked the body overboard?”

12

“We couldn’t stuff him,” said the Second Officer with a sigh. “As for preserving him in spirits, we hadn’t enough spirits left to think of it. We rigged a special derrick, and heaved Bingo overboard, carrying away, as you have guessed, the port-rail in the operation. As Bingo’s tremendous carcass rose and floated buoyantly away to 

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