landing place or chartered sounding, near Ouklacool
Aides, and, having loaded it there with wounded, had ordered it across
to the Black Sea and down the Dardanelles. The stout Ayrshire heart
of the captain was sick and sore within him many a time on that grim
voyage, for before it was half over he had spent his last round shot on
board and his last bit of spare canvas in the sewing up and weighting of
men who were fated to be buried in the deep.

Amongst those who escaped this dreary fate were Polson Jervase and the
enemy he had rescued at so grave a risk of his own life, and they
two, with about one half the original human cargo of the ship, reached
Scutari, and were landed there, and carried into hospital. A rough sea
voyage in January weather in the Black Sea affords no pleasant nurture
for a wounded man, and the poor fellows who were carried or helped
ashore were a pitiable crew indeed. Neither Polson nor his enemy was
conscious at the hour of landing, or had been truly conscious throughout
the whole of the long and trying voyage. They were lowered in their
stretchers from the ship's side to the caiques which were brought
alongside, pulled to the shore and carried by hand to the hospital.
They were luckier in this respect than the majority of the men, who were
huddled into the straw of the lumbering octagonal-wheeled arabas. The
rustic Turk had not yet mastered the art, even if he has mastered
it to-day, of constructing a cartwheel in a circle. He makes it
eight-sided, and builds his vehicles without springs, and the wounded
went along the vile road with a compound jolt for every foot of ground
they traversed. There are men yet living who remember that piercing
scene, and the cries which were wrung from the hearts of the stoutest
fighting men in the world along that _via dolorosa_. It happened that
the rescued and the rescuer were laid side by side, each on a bed some
twenty inches in width; and there they were tended many days before
either of them awoke to a real knowledge of his surroundings. In their
waking hours they babbled deliriously, the pair of them, letting out the
secrets of their very souls, if anybody had been there to listen. Day by
day, and night by night, Polson, as he remembered afterwards, heard the
best loved voice in the world from time to time, and sometimes with it
and sometimes alone the voice he hated most. The wind was blowing the
rain against the windows of the grey-stone house on Beacon Hi