there in. I knew there was a good chance that we’d been mates in the old Virago, and there even seemed a familiar sound to his voice. But I wasn’t fated ever to find out. He just kept on muttering, slipping up on some words as if something was wrong with his mouth, and I didn’t dare light a match, of course. When I tried to ease him up a bit by lifting so he’d lie straight—well, all of him didn’t seem to come along when I started dragging by his shoulders. I never did find what was wrong with him, for right then new troubles of my own set in.

“I was still down on my knees trying to locate what was missing with this poor guy, when—out of the corner of my eye, for it was near behind me—I spotted the flash of a ship challenging. Bow challenged back—from somewhere aft—and then what

I piped at once for a Hun destroyer switched on searchlights and opened fire. She was about two cables off on our port quarter, heading right for us and blazing away with one or two guns, probably all that would bear on that course. A second destroyer, right astern her, didn’t seem to be firing. I heard the bang and saw the flash of two or three shells bursting somewhere amidships, and then the Bow’s port after gun began to reply. The crews of all the others were knocked out, and so were the searchlights.

“Between the twenty-three from the Seagull and what were left of the Bow’s fo’c’sl’ guns’ crews, there must have been thirty-five to forty men bunched together there for’rard of the wreck of the bridge. When the firing started, the whole kaboodle of us did what you’re always under orders to do when you have nothing to stand up for—laid down. Or, rather, we just tumbled into a heap like a pile of dead rabbits.

“I went sprawling over the poor devil I was trying to help, and there were two or three on top of me. Into that squirming hump of human flesh one of the Hun’s projes landed kerplump. It didn’t hit me at all, that one, but I can feel yet the kind of heave the whole bunch gave as it ploughed through. Then it was like warm water was being thrown on the pile in buckets, but it wasn’t till I had scrambled out and found it sticky that I twigged it was blood.

“Bad as it was, it might have been a lot worse. There hadn’t been enough resistance to explode the proj, and so it killed only four or five and wounded, maybe, twice that, where it would have scoured every man jack of us into the sea and Kingdom Come if it had gone off. The next one found something in the wreck of the bridge hard enough to crack it off though, and it was a ragged scrap of its casing that drove in to the point of my hip and put a kink in my rolling gait that I’ve never quite shaken out yet. It wasn’t much of a hurt to what it gave some, though, ’specially a lad that caught the main kick of it and got ditched to starboard, some of him going under the wire rail, and some over.

“The Huns couldn’t have known how down and out the Bow really was, for there was nothing in the world but that one port gun to prevent their closing and polishing her off. The chances are they recognised her class, knew she was more than a match for the pair of them if she was right, and were glad to get off with no more’n an exchange of shots in passing. That was the end of the fighting for the Bow, and about time, too. Her bows were stove in, all the fore part of her was full of water, her bridge was smashed and useless, her W.T. and searchlights were finished, all but one gun was out of action, and—when they came to count noses next day—forty-two of her crew were dead. Far from looking for more trouble, it was now only a

question of making harbour, and even that—as it turned out—was touch-and-go for two days.

“It was about one in the morning when that brush with the destroyers came off, and after that there was nothing to do but hang on till daylight and they could clear a way to reach us from abaft the wreckage of the bridge. It was pretty awful, ticking off the minutes there in the darkness. A good many of the worst knocked about were talking a bit wild, but I never heard the guy with the Chinook wa-wa again. He must have died and been pitched over while I was being bandaged up. I did hear the ‘wool-mat-maker’ yapping again, though, saying how ‘target cloth’ was better to work on than canvas, and describing how to pull the stuff through in a loose loop, and then cut them so that they bunched up in ‘soft, puffy balls.’ Seems like I was cussing him when I dropped off to sleep.

“I must have bled a good deal, for I slept like a log for four or five hours, and woke up only when some one turned me over and began to finger my hip. It was broad daylight, but hazy, and the sun just showing through. Some of the wounded had already been carried aft, and they were mostly dead ones that were lying around. These were being sewed up in canvas to get ready to bury. I thought there was something familiar in the face of one guy I saw them laying out and sort of collecting together, but it wasn’t till later that it suddenly came to me that he was the one I had seen

by firelight when he stood up and looked at himself where he’d been shot in two.

“The two guys who bundled me up in a ‘Neil Robertson’ stretcher and packed me aft, picking their way over and through the wreckage, were both all bound up with rags, and so was about every one else I saw. They took me below into the wardroom, and then, because that was full up, on to some officer’s cabin, where they found a place for me on the deck. After a while, a little dark guy—he was also a good deal bandaged, and so splashed with blood that I didn’t notice at the time he was a sick bay steward—came in, washed my wound out with some dope that smarted like the devil, and tied it up. He worked like a streak of greased lightning, and then went on to some one else. That chap was Pridmore, and, let me tell you, he was the real ‘top-liner’ of all the heroes of the Bow. The surgeon had been killed at the first salvo the night before, leaving no one but him to carry on through all the hell that followed. And some way—God knows how—he did it; yes, even though he was wounded three or four times himself, and though he had to go without sleep for more’n two days to find time to dress and tend the thirty or forty crocks he had on his hands. He was sure the star turn, that Pridmore, and I was glad to read the other day that they had given him the D.S.M. Not that he’d have all he deserved if they hung medals all over him; but—well, a guy likes

to have something to show that what he’s done hasn’t been lost in the shuffle entirely.”

I made an entry of “Pridmore, sick bay steward, Bow,” in my notebook for future reference, and as I was returning it to my pocket a sudden list to starboard, accompanied by a throbbing grind of the helm, heralded a sharp alteration of course. Round she went through ten or twelve points, finally to steady and stand away on a course that seemed to lead toward the dip in the skyline between the jagged range of mountains back of Monastir and the point where a lowering bank of cirro-cumuli hid the ancient abode of the gods on the snow-capped summit of Olympus. On Number Two assuring me that his yarn was spun, that there was nothing more to it save an attempt he had made, in spite of his wound, to get into a fight that started when some of the wounded were hissed by a gang of dockyard “mateys”—I clambered back to the bridge to learn the significance of the new move. I still wanted to hear Gains’ story of the Killarney, but I