Sumner kills Drax

Patrick Sumner’s killing of Henry Drax ends their pursuit-and-escape conflict in a sudden reversal: Drax enters the cabin expecting to find the surgeon, but Sumner is waiting inside. The act settles their immediate confrontation, yet leaves Sumner shaken and already moving toward an uncertain next step.

The killing and its immediate aftermath

Drax has come to the timber yard after learning from Jacob Baxter that Sumner intends to hunt him down and hire someone to find him in Canada. Calling out for the surgeon, he approaches a cabin with broken, shutterless windows. Sumner waits inside, holding a rusted saw blade; when Drax crosses the threshold, Sumner strikes him and kills him. He takes Drax’s revolver and hurries back across the yard.

In the dark street, Sumner feels physically altered by the shock but keeps walking at a steady pace, without looking back. He passes two pubs before entering a third, where he orders ale and waits for his trembling hands to settle. He fumbles twice while trying to light his pipe, then puts it away beside Drax’s revolver. The barman watches without speaking. Sumner asks for a railway timetable, but the barman has none, leaving Sumner’s immediate departure plans unresolved.

Narrative framing and significance

The scene turns on a sharp change in access to the action: Drax’s search gives way to Sumner’s concealed position, and the brief break before the cabin encounter delays the confirmation of that reversal. The narration presents Sumner’s response as nearly automatic, then shifts to his horror at what he has done. That sequence offers no account of a considered motive or a claim that the killing resolves their larger conflict; instead, it marks the immediate end of their confrontation while leaving its effect on Sumner unsettled.

Violence beyond the hunt

Earlier, Drax’s violence is embedded in the sealing trade: working alone across the ice, he kills seals and strips their skins, while Brownlee counts the haul in oil, tonnage, and market value. Sumner, too, has been drawn into the ship’s physical labor, carrying heavy blocks of blubber from the foredeck to the hold. Against that commercial world of killing and processing, the encounter between the two men is not presented as another productive act. Its immediate consequence is instead personal and destabilizing, leaving Sumner to carry the shock of what he has done.

From bodily proof to violent action

Before the final confrontation, Sumner had experienced physical labor as a rare test that briefly restored his sense of capability. After two whales were flensed, he was assigned to carry blocks of blubber, each weighing twenty pounds or more, from the foredeck and pitch them down to the men below. The blood- and grease-slick deck made the work hazardous: Sumner slipped several times and nearly fell into the hold before Otto saved him. Yet he ended the day bruised and aching with satisfaction at having tested and proved his body, and slept without laudanum. That earlier response sharpens the contrast with the killing: in the cabin, Sumner acts without reflection, then stares in horror at what he has done. Physical exertion had offered him a task completed; violence leaves him with an accomplishment he cannot meet with the same satisfaction.