is mouth, blew a piercing
whistle. The next moment he was almost blinded as a searchlight swept
across the water and remained fixed upon him. It was appalling, that
intense white glare showing up his frightful loneliness out there on the
calm heedless sea. The beam wavered and vanished. And at the same moment
some premonition made Mr. Spokesly prepare to move off. The _Tanganyika_
was going down. Deep bellowings in her interior gave warning. He decided
not to wait, and slipped into the water. And before he had reached the
boat whose oars he heard working rapidly just ahead of him, there was a
final swirl and hiccough on the water, and the _Tanganyika_ was gone.

* * * * *

When he woke it was some twenty hours later, for the surgeon had bound
up his face and put stitches into a number of lacerations in his body,
and had given him cocaine to make him sleep. The sloop was anchoring
down by the flour mills, and looking out through his port-hole Mr.
Spokesly could see the gardens of the White Tower of Saloniki.

CHAPTER VIII

Mr. Spokesly sat at a little distance from the large table in the
Transport Office and listened to the gentleman with four rings of gold
lace on his sleeve. It was a lofty and desolate place in the yellow
stucco building opposite the dock entrance. The transport officer was a
naval captain; with a beard, a brisk decisive manner, and a very foul
briar pipe. He was explaining that they needed a third mate for a ship
going to Basra and Mr. Spokesly would just do for the job if he would
waive his right to a passage home and go to Port Said instead. It was at
this point that Mr. Spokesly, rather shaky still from his immersion and
extensively decorated with pieces of plaster, took a hand.

"No," he said and kept his gaze on the floor.

"Why not?" demanded the captain, very much astonished.

"No reason's far as I know. But I'm not going third mate of anything,
anywhere, any more. That's that."

"Well, of course, we can't _force_ you to go, you know."

"I know you can't."

"But we shall really have to draw the attention of the owners to the
fact that you refused to go."

"That's all right. But I'm not going. I'll go home if you don't mind. Or
if I can get a job here I take it my articles finished with the
_Tanganyika_."

"No doubt, no doubt. But what could you get here?"

"I don't know what I could do. But I'd shine shoes on the steps out
there before I we