The floor of the vault was sandy; and so, though I fell crookedly,
I took but little harm beyond a shaking; and soon, pulling myself
together, set to strike my flint and blow the match into a flame to
search for the fallen candle. Yet all the time I kept in my fingers this
handful of light stuff; and when the flame burnt up again I held the
thing against the light, and saw that it was no wisp of seaweed, but
something black and wiry. For a moment, I could not gather what I had
hold of, but then gave a start that nearly sent the candle out, and
perhaps a cry, and let it drop as if it were red-hot iron, for I knew
that it was a man's beard.
Now when I saw that, I felt a sort of throttling fright, as though one
had caught hold of my heartstrings; and so many and such strange thoughts
rose in me, that the blood went pounding round and round in my head, as
it did once afterwards when I was fighting with the sea and near drowned.
Surely to have in hand the beard of any dead man in any place was bad
enough, but worse a thousand times in such a place as this, and to know
on whose face it had grown. For, almost before I fully saw what it was, I
knew it was that black beard which had given Colonel John Mohune his
nickname, and this was his great coffin I had hid behind.
I had lain, therefore, all that time, cheek by jowl with Blackbeard
himself, with only a thin shell of tinder wood to keep him from me, and
now had thrust my hand into his coffin and plucked away his beard.
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