though I'd been opening
another man's letters."

The transport drove through the empty seas with heavy, clumsy
upheavals, rolling like a buoy. Having been originally intended for the
freight-carrying trade, she had no sympathy with hearts that beat for
a sight of their native land, or for lives that counted their remaining
minutes by the throbbing of her engines. Occasionally, without apparent
reason, she was thrown violently from her course: but it was invariably
the case that when her stern went to starboard, something splashed in
the water on her port side and drifted past her, until, when it had
cleared the blades of her propeller, a voice cried out, and she was
swung back on her home-bound track again.

The Lieutenant missed the familiar palms and the tiny block-house; and
seeing nothing beyond the iron rails but great wastes of gray water, he
decided he was on board a prison-ship, or that he had been strapped to
a raft and cast adrift. People came for hours at a time and stood at the
foot of his cot, and talked with him and he to them--people he had loved
and people he had long forgotten, some of whom he had thought were dead.
One of them he could have sworn he had seen buried in a deep trench, and
covered with branches of palmetto. He had heard the bugler, with tears
choking him, sound "taps;" and with his own hand he had placed the dead
man's campaign hat on the mound of fresh earth above the grave. Yet here
he was still alive, and he came with other men of his troop to speak to
him; but when he reached out to them they were gone--the real and the
unreal, the dead and the living--and even She disappeared whenever he
tried to take her hand, and sometimes the hospital steward drove her
away.

"Did that young lady say when she was coming back again?" he asked the
steward.

"The young lady! What young lady?" asked the steward, wearily.

"The one who has been sitting there," he answered. He pointed with his
gaunt hand at the man in the next cot.

"Oh, that young lady. Yes, she's coming back. She's just gone below to
fetch you some hard-tack."

The young volunteer in the next cot whined grievously.

"That crazy man gives me the creeps," he groaned. "He's always waking me
up, and looking at me as though he was going to eat me."

"Shut your head," said the steward. "He's a better man crazy than you'll
ever be with the little sense you've got. And he has two Mauser holes
in him. Crazy, eh? It's a damned good