line
where some of the wrecked stern of her showed against the phosphorescent
glow of the churn of her screws--that was my good-bye peep at all that
was left of the good old _Seagull_. Gains here, or Jock Campbell, can
tell you what her finish was. I don't like to talk about it.

"Some of us tried to get aft as soon as we were clear of the _Seagull_,
but couldn't make the grade over the wreck of the bridge. As all the
officers and men who had been there had either been killed or wounded,
or had gone to the after steering position they were now conning her
from, we were as much cut off from them as though we were on another
craft altogether. All the crews of her fo'c'sl' guns--or such of them as
were still alive--were in the same fix. So we just bunched up there in
the dark and waited. Some of the wounded were in beastly shape, but
there wasn't much to be done for them, even in the way of first aid.
Some shipmates of other times drifted together in the darkness, and I
remember 'specially--it was while I was trying to tie up some guy's
scalp with the sleeve of my shirt--hearing one of them telling another
of a wool mat he had just made, all with ravellings from 'Harry
Freeman.'[B] Funny how it's the little things like that a man
remembers. The gunner whose head I bound up was telling me just how the
_Bow_ happened to be strafed, but it went in one ear and out of the
other.

[Footnote B: The bluejackets' name for knitted woollen gifts from
friends on the beach.]

"But the queerest thing was me hearing some guy lying all messed up on
the deck muttering something about _skookum kluches_, and some more
Chinook _wa-wa_ that I knew he couldn't have picked up anywhere else but
from serving in a 'T.B.D.' working up and down the old Inland Passage
from Vancouver Island. I felt my way to where he was huddled up in the
wreck of a smashed gun, told him that I was another _tilicum_ from the
'Squimalt Base, and asked him what ship he had been there in. I knew
there was a good chance that we'd been mates in the old _Virago_, and
there even seemed a familiar sound to his voice. But I wasn't fated ever
to find out. He just kept on muttering, slipping up on some words as if
something was wrong with his mouth, and I didn't dare light a match, of
course. When I tried to ease him up a bit by lifting so he'd lie
straight--well, all of him didn't seem to come along when I started
dragging by his shoulders. I never did find what was wrong wi