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Between The Millstones
by
Life on a torpedo-boat engaged in despatch duty and rushing through a Gulf Stream sea at thirty knots is torture to a healthy, nervous system. It sent this sick man into speedy delirium. He could eat very little, but he drank all the water that was given him. Moaning and muttering, tossing about in his hammock, never asleep, but sometimes unconscious, at other times raving, and occasionally lucid, he presented a problem which demanded solution. His emaciated face, flushed at first, had taken on a peculiar bronzed appearance, and there were some who declared that it was Yellow Jack. But nothing could be done until they reached the fleet and could interview a cruiser with a surgeon.
The sick man solved the problem. He scrambled out of his hammock at daylight in the morning and dressed himself in his blue uniform, carefully tying his black neckerchief in the regulation knot. Then, muttering the while, he gained the deck.
The boat was charging along at full speed, throwing aside a bow wave nearly as high as herself. Three miles astern, just discernible in the half-light, was a pursuing ram-bowed gunboat, spitting shot and shell; and forward near the conning-tower were two blue-coated, brass-buttoned officers, watching the pursuer through binoculars.
The crazed brain of the sick man took cognizance of nothing but the blue coats and brass buttons. He did not look for locust clubs and silver shields. These were policemen–his deadliest enemies; but he would escape them this time.
With a yell he went overboard, and, being no swimmer, would have drowned had not one of the blue-coated officers flung a lifebuoy. He came to the surface somewhat saner, and seized the white ring, which supported him, while the torpedo-boat rushed on. She could not stop for one man in time of war, with a heavily armed enemy so near.
A twenty-knot gunboat cannot chase a thirty-knot torpedo-boat very long without losing her below the horizon; but this pursuit lasted ten minutes from the time the sick man went overboard before the gunboat ceased firing and slackened speed. The quarry was five miles away, out of Spanish range, and the floating man directly under her bow. He was seen and taken on board, with Spanish profanity sounding in his unregarding ears.
He lay on the deck, a bedraggled heap, gibbering and shivering, while a surgeon, with cotton in his nostrils and smelling-salts in his hand, diagnosed his case. Then the gunboat headed north and dropped anchor in the bight of a small, crescent-shaped sand-key of the Florida Reef. For the diagnosis was such as to suggest prompt action. Two brave men bundled him into the dinghy, lowered it, pulled ashore, and laid him on the sand.
Returning, they stripped and threw away their clothing, sank the boat with a buoy on the painter, took a swim, and climbed aboard to be further disinfected. Then the gunboat lifted her anchor and steamed eastward, her officers watching through glasses a small, low torpedo-boat, far to the southeast,–too far to be reached by gun fire,–which was steering a parallel course, and presumably watching the gunboat.
An idiot, a lunatic, with bloodshot eyes glaring from a yellow face, raved, rolled, and staggered bareheaded under the sun about the sandy crescent until sundown, then fell prostrate and unconscious into the water on the beach, luckily turning over so that his nostrils were not immersed. The tide went down, leaving him damp and still on the sands. In about an hour a sigh, followed by a deep, gasping breath, escaped him; another long inhalation succeeded, and another; then came steady, healthy breathing and childlike sleep, with perspiration oozing from every pore. He had passed a crisis.
About midnight the cloudy sky cleared and the tropic stars came out, while the tide climbed the beach again, and lapped at the sleeping man’s feet; but he did not waken, even when the Spanish gunboat stole slowly into the bay from the sea and dropped anchor with a loud rattling of chain in the hawse-pipe. A boat was lowered, and a single man sculled it ashore; then lifting out a small cask and bag, he placed them high on the sands and looked around.