So long it takes to tell these things. So brief a time to happen. In eighteen seconds the submarine had gone a thousand yards, and men struggling in her wake had crowded a lifetime into a span.

Horrible as were the cries of the drowning, Newcomb's crowning fear was that they would cease. He clung to his broken grating, and strained his eyes in the changing light. Off there to left of him—not again the submarine! She had checked her course and swung round. As quickly as she had shot away after her murderous work was done, here, describing a half-circle, she was rushing back.

Almost at the instant of recognition of the changed course there, only a few yards off, a head, two heads, showed above the water. Newcomb remembered crying out a warning, "She's coming back!" as the swift seconds brought the swifter U-boat and the sound of renewed firing nearer. Newcomb could see the figure of the commander jumping about grotesquely on the narrow platform of the conning-tower, and heard him calling down to the armed sailors on the deck. And all the while the commander himself kept firing, like a madman, down on the water at every head he saw. Hit or miss and on to the next. As the submarine raced by, he shot even the bits of wreckage; he shot the shadows. "Ha! da ist eins. Und da—siehst du? Noch eins—!"

Meanwhile the torch-lights and the flash, sweeping again the farther reaches, lighted fiercely whatever they played on, and thus the intervening lanes of blackness between the lighted ridges of the waves offered momentary asylum. Up one of these dim stretches Newcomb trod water, clinging to his fragment of grating.

How long after he never knew before that moment when he sighted the moving shadow that turned into a lifeboat. A man clung to the gunwale with one hand, and with the other helped hands outstretched from the boat to draw some one on board.

"There is no r-r-room!" a voice was crying. In the midst of the passionate altercation between the officer in charge and a woman in the boat, Grant and Newcomb were hauled in and given rum.

At intervals, with his flash, the officer in charge swept the circumambient shadow. Though Newcomb was beginning to revive, he couldn't face that void. He turned to the human presences nearest him. At his side was a man the officer called Gillow, thick-set, ruddy, with close black beard and lively eyes. Among those last confused recollections on board the Leyden had been this fellow's running up on deck barefoot and in his underclothes. He sat now in somebody's overcoat, with a blanket muffled about his legs and feet. A child somewhere behind began to cry.

Newcomb turned to look back. The exploring light picked out a head in a close-fitting cap tied well down with a heavy veil that left the face uncovered. For an instant Newcomb met the challenging eyes of Greta.

In the bottom of the boat, dead or unconscious, lay the girl, Nan Ellis.

The night wore on, with low-voiced tales of what they had been through. Engineer Gillow told how, in the confusion of the launching, lifeboat No. 11, originally in charge of the officer of the watch, had collided with two other boats. All three were damaged, No. 11 so seriously as to be virtually useless. In the end No. 11 wasn't needed, was Gillow's terse summary of what followed. It hadn't been possible to save everybody; they had done their best. There was a poor devil there in the bow, a naked stoker they had picked up. He'd had his clothes burned off by the fire in the engine-room. Assistant-Engineer Gillow himself had as narrow an escape as any; he'd been asleep while the torpedoed ship was sinking. A rush of sea water had washed him out of his bunk barely in time, as he put it, to catch the last boat. Now he was going to catch forty winks. He folded his short arms with an air of resolution, and dropped his beard into the turned-up collar of the borrowed coat. In two or three minutes he slept. The rest sat waiting for the day.

That dawning, so passionately longed for, showed no hint of man or of his work on all the plain of ocean, not so much as a shattered thwart.

On the lifeboat itself the gray, sun-shrouded morning showed a company of eight men, counting Newcomb, Grant, and the stoker; seven women; four children, fretful from chill and hunger; and a half-grown cabin-boy. The second officer, a wiry, hard-bitten Welshman, was staring through his binoculars north, south, east, west. Hardly would he persuade himself to put the glass down when he would grip hold of it again. Up it would go to eyes that had gleamed an instant with some new, some always futile hope.

The naked stoker had been partly clothed. He lay in a stupor of exhaustion under damp coats and sodden canvas. The gray daylight showed Julian Grant with feverish eyes, and dry lips that said, "Nan's sleeping, too." She shared the tarpaulin which had been spread in the first place for the stoker and two children. Grant and two women, a stewardess and a passenger with a baby, occupied the seat facing the captain and the bow, facing that still figure of Nan Ellis. Miss Greta, as the morning showed, was the only woman not disheveled. Whether in the collision she had been wet at all, she looked dry now, and still rigorously buttoned up, tied down, and belted in. She was still wearing the small flat RÜch-Sak, lying high on her high shoulders, and she kept her eyes on the second officer; especially when, after he had shut his binocular case with a snap, he began to serve out rations of biscuit and water.

A child began to wail. "I can't keep him warm," said the mother. Her face was wet.

After consultation with Engineer Gillow, the second officer decided it was no use waiting for the rescue ship. He called for rowers. He called for something white for a flag of distress.

A man offered a gray sweater for the crying child on condition the mother should take off its white frock and let that be flown as a signal. The mother wanted to take the sweater and keep the white frock, too. With difficulty she was persuaded to the exchange.

Grant had roused Nan Ellis to take her share of the biscuit and water ration. She opened heavy eyes, ate, drank, and slept again the profound sleep of exhaustion.

Newcomb and Grant had been among the first to take each his turn at the oars. They kept it up in shifts all the windless day, and all day long the baby's frock signaled the distress which there seemed no eye on all the globe to heed.

Toward evening the stoker grew delirious. Out of the wrappings that concealed him he lifted a huge head, bristling with coarse, red hair.

"I know," he shouted in a Devon accent—"suffocated in the bunkers! That's it; yes, suffocated!" The giant choked and began to thrash about.

"Can't have that!" called out the second officer. "Quiet there!" The stern voice seemed to bring the man to himself for a minute. At the first sign of disturbance Newcomb had turned with an impulse to reassure Nan Ellis; but she slept on.

The eyes of the second officer came back once more from that endless interrogation of the ocean. "Boat won't stand much," he said in an undertone. "Mended one leak."

Down at his feet the red-haired giant was stirring again. He heaved, he cursed at some obstruction there under the canvas. He sat up and pulled out a block and tackle; and with it he fell to hammering at a stay.

"Open the hatch..." he shouted a string of foul language.

Nan Ellis started up, and turned with horror to face the incredible apparition.

"Lash him down," ordered the second officer, calmly.

It was a horrible performance. The girl hid her eyes till Grant had put her in his own place, but facing the other way, while he helped the engineer, the cabin-boy, and Newcomb to overpower the man. The girl sat crouched at Greta's side, each looking a different way. In an interval in his grim business Newcomb watched for the moment of recognition between the two, a moment strangely long delayed. Presently it dawned upon him that each was intimately aware of the other's presence and that neither meant to make a sign.

In the little breeze that at last was springing up the second officer, with help of Gillow and the cabin-boy, was getting up the sail. For the space of a good hour the boat sped over the water. At dusk the wind freshened, the sail was reefed down for the night under a sky all nimbus near the horizon, the zenith full of drab-colored cumulus moving sullenly northeast.

"It's below freezing all right," some one said.

Another spoke of the effect of icebergs drifting down.

"It's the time of year that happens."

"I wish it would freeze the stoker's tongue," said the cabin-boy.

An hour went by, longer than the longest day. Newcomb was dropping into a painful doze when something brought him back to a yet more painful consciousness. What was it? He was too much reduced to take the smallest initiative in finding out. He sat huddled, staring at the moon risen well above the nimbus and for the moment riding clear even of the scattered cumulus. Engineer Gillow had the watch. The second officer sat in the bow, with rigid back and open eyes. The stoker moaned. Every one else slept or seemed to sleep. No, not the two women sitting together with eyes averted.

"I didn't know it was you, Nan," he heard Greta whisper.

"You knew it was somebody," came the answer at last.

"All I could think of is, he's waiting for me! Ernst! He's escaped. I dare not die while Ernst needs me."

The girl made no sound.

"Can't you understand what it means to me that he should say, 'For the sake of everything we care for, I must come and help him!' How could I think that anybody else's life mattered—when Ernst is waiting for me!"

"Waiting for you.... Where?"

"Oh, I shall find him—And nobody else will! 'It all depends on you, Greta'; that's what he says. He'll see that I'm safe, he says,' and happy!' For the first time he speaks of marriage. He needs me!" she triumphed.

"One last great service is laid upon us, then Buenos Aires—Ernst and I."

The stoker's moaning mounted to a horrible, hoarse yell. It waked the sleeping, half-numb children. They, too, screamed with fright and misery. So the hours wore on, with appeals for water, with weeping and with worse. Once the stoker wrenched himself free. They bound him again. That made him more violent than before. All the rest of the night he raved. In the morning he was gone. No one asked a question.

The sail went up early that day, though the sea looked threatening and the wind was squally. Within the hour all canvas had to be furled and the sea-anchor streamed. The lamentable figures in the boat huddled closer. Of Greta you could hardly see a distinguishing sign, so was she muffled and surrounded. The seas rose higher and the wash came flooding in.

"Just as well they should think we get it over the gunwale," the second officer said to Newcomb. "Some of the damned rivets must have got strained."

The passengers began to crowd up, half toward the bow, half at the stern. Amidships was awash.

The hail turned to sleet, and the sleet to fine rain. In the stark misery of it the longing grew almost irresistible to jump overboard and end it all. More than one of that tragic company thought again and again: "I've come to the end. I can bear no more," not knowing yet the awful power of the flesh to endure and keep the soul imprisoned.

But the chance-made captain knew. "A hand here!" he ordered, and Newcomb helped the engineer to spread the boat-cover over the people, and to do it in spite of the icy wind that tore the freezing canvas out of one's grasp and seemed along with it to tear out one's finger-nails; failing that, to wrench one's half-frozen fingers out of their sockets. Yet at last the thing was spread and fastened. There was no one who didn't welcome it, and none to whom, as shelter, it wasn't a mock. Some craned out and held the canvas so as to catch the rain. There was enough to sting, enough to chill the marrow, but not enough to drink; yet furred and feverish tongues were pressed against the moistened canvas.

Toward evening the appeals for water became demands. One of the women, a thin, febrile creature with insane eyes, grew violent. For more than one the early stages of hushed despair had passed. Few were able to sit still. They came out from under cover with faces that made the heart shrink. They climbed about the boat in the failing light, moaning, threatening. Among the worst was the cabin-boy. It was clear he was light-headed.

"You've been drinking sea-water," the captain arraigned him, fiercely.

The boy denied the charge, whimpering.

"I think, sir," the engineer interrupted, "the sea-anchor's gone." The captain lashed two oars together and made another. In the early darkness the wind freshened, drenching the boat with spray.

Greta had joined in the bailing. She came up out of the stern like some hibernating brown animal of the bursa family. She worked well.

They bailed in shifts, hour by hour. The men bailed all night long. They bailed till the buckets and pannikins fell out of their swollen hands. In the small hours of morning Nan Ellis had crawled to the seat by Grant.

Another eternity went by. Slow daylight battled long with the mists of night and fog. The girl sat with her arms round the rigid figure of Julian Grant; but for that he would have slipped away like that other—Did any one know besides Newcomb of the gray head lying face downward in the wash that was sucking and slapping to and fro in the bottom of the boat?

Newcomb himself lost all sense of time in those intervals of partial unconsciousness too full of suffering to deserve the name of sleep, but he recollected the timbre of the voice that called out something inarticulate in German just before Gillow shouted, "Light! a light!"

And there it was, far away to eastward, infinitesimal, but steady, a gleam. At first it looked as if it might be the morning star shining through the breaking fog-veil, red like Mars. Then, changing like only man-made brightness, the light showed green.

The excitement among those who still were conscious bore its touch of mania. Where the captain's stern call to order might have failed, the question, "Who knows if it isn't a submarine?" sobered the most hopeful.

"Whatever it is, it's coming nearer!" Nan Ellis cried the news at Julian's irresponsive ear. Out of the cage of despair her flagging voice soared in a rapture of recovered faith: "Light, Julian! A light!"

And now there stood out against the streak of dawn the hull and funnels of a steamer. All eyes watched that phantom ship as though for an instant to lose sight of her would be tantamount to letting her go to the bottom. They held her to her holy purpose by that thread of vision, the optic nerve. And to those passionately watchful eyes the course of the steamer had seemed to lie in a dead reckoning right across the lifeboat. She couldn't miss them. Suddenly her course diverged; she was bearing to the west! Newcomb saw the captain's hand shake as he lighted a signal, his only and most precious Coston Light. Ah, she got that! Another feeble cry went up from the lifeboat, for the steamer slackened speed, she turned. She had altered her course for fear of running the lifeboat down. Now perhaps she could see—

Anyway, eyes in the lifeboat could see—the steamer sheering off to southward. The captain and the engineer shot off their pistols. Others in the boat, not too far gone, screamed like creatures on the rack. It wasn't tragic so much as horrible. They howled like animals.

The ship went on. She faded. She was gone.

"They're afraid it's a trap," said the engineer. "You didn't know it, but we're a decoy-boat, ha, ha! Signals of distress? Ha! ha! Too thin. We're a submarine. Didn't you know?"

More than men and boats had been sacrificed in the war.