b have dreamed a transition so horrible!

Already scores of panic-stricken were climbing on an overturned boat,
drifting off to the right. Another upturned boat floated at a greater
distance, and Jeb saw the bobbing heads appear again, beginning to move
as a flock of swimming ducks toward it. But many heads did not move at
all, and he knew what their inertia meant. One of this kind floated
close to him, and made him sick. He pushed it away, but it kept drifting
back, seeming unwilling to leave him, till in desperation he untied the
life belt tapes and let it sink. An hour earlier, had Jeb been told he
could do this, he would have screamed denials.

Presently a voice hailed him cheerily, and he beheld Tim, still holding
the little nurse, balanced on a kind of box affair that floated almost
flush with the water.

"Come over, Jeb," the sergeant called. "Shure, an' there's room for wan
more, an' 'tis cold ye'll be, I'm thinkin' afore we turn in tonight!"

"He oughtn't to joke like that," Jeb thought, beginning now to shiver;
for he had become tired, and swam the intervening distance painfully.

"Easy, lad," Tim leaned to give him a hand, "for if ye don't look smart
'tis off we go agin, an' 'twon't do the lass no good bein' colder'n she
is! Did I hurt ye now, me darlin'?" he asked a moment later of the
little nurse, who smiled back at him. Blood and water were trickling
down her ashen face from a scalp wound; yet she was many times more
fortunate than scores of other poor creatures near to them. There is an
unparalleled ruthlessness in a sweeping wave of heavy debris, beneath
which a human body can be ground to atoms.

Jeb had no more than safely got astride the box--a tippy affair it
was--when they were startled by someone blaspheming in a way that made
their flesh creep. Even Tim blanched; for in the voice he recognized the
timbre of insanity. He had seen this happen in the trenches, when men
driven mad by concussion or gas or horrors ran amuck among their
fellows. The one who now swam toward them was evidently a stoker--a
powerful creature. His face was grimed with coal dirt, his eyes were
red, and his blasphemies were interspersed with hilarity at the prospect
of cutting their throats. When thirty yards off he stopped swimming,
reached beneath the life belt and got out a knife--then, holding it
conveniently between his teeth, came on.

Jeb would have left the box and made a dash for the open sea had not Tim
checke