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 started me guessing. I think you kids had better tarn in now; it’s getting late.
All right, there isn’t much more. We had no guess how long the man had been in the boat or whether he had starved or what. He might have been dead several days, I thought. The life boat was awash. There was the name of some ship or other on the bows, but the boat had been painted since the name was printed there, and all I could make out was a few indistinct letters under the fresh paint. I made out an L, then DY, then NNE. I have a hunch the name was _Lady Anne_, but maybe not.