re in one dickens of a fix. It was late afternoon and there we
were blowing around the ocean, bailing to keep on top, and with the land
moving farther and farther away all the time. By dusk the shore was just a
misty line, that was all. Every wave that hit us, meant bailing like mad
to keep our gunwale above water. We took off the muffler and used it to
bail with.

A dozen times we lighted our lantern and a dozen times the wind or the sea
put it out. It was water soaked, useless. I said, "Jake, it's all up with
us," and he said he guessed it was.

Boys, I've gone forty-eight hours without sleeping, in France. I've gone
three days without food. I've seen a shell burst into smithereens ten feet
from me. But I'd rather go through all that again, I'd rather play tennis
and drink tea, even, than to go through another night like that. All night
we couldn't so much as see each other's faces. Our arms were stiff. We
just bailed, bailed, bailed and kept her from swamping.

In the morning the weather eased up a little and if we had only had her
running, she would have taken the seas all right. She's a filthy little
boat, but game. But an engine is never game; it's always the boat that's
game. A gas engine is a natural born coward and a quitter. A hull will
fight to the last. If our engine hadn't lain down, we could have hit the
sea crossways and we'd have skimmed over it like a car on a scenic
railway, but the swell got us sideways and we swung like a hammock.

Anyhow, we could ease up a little on the bailing and before the sun was
well up, we were able to use the oar. We had only one, because the other
one was carried away. But we managed to keep that little jitney head-on,
and pretty soon we knew it wasn't a case of drowning, but more likely a
case of starving. There wasn't a speck of land in sight. We might have
been half way to Europe for all _I_ knew.

Well, after a while Jake said, "What's that? Looks like a log floating."

It didn't look like anything much, but it wasn't the ocean, that was sure,
and we tried to make it with our oar. The thing was drifting in on us, so
we didn't have to do all the work-just get in its path. We could slacken
our own drifting with the oar, so pretty soon we were alongside it and saw
it was a swamped life boat. There was one man floating around in it-dead.
That two hundred dollars belonged-or rather was in his pocket. There were
some other things in his pockets too; some things that start