"Oh, you're back. I say, just lean over here—"
"Jack!" Captain Runacles caught him by the coat-tails, and tore him back. "Now listen; you're not to speak; you're not to ask questions; you're not to open your mouth. You've just to come—that's all."
He took the little man and hurried him ashore. He was breathless; but he ran Captain Barker over the gang-plank like a charging bull.
"One moment, Jemmy—Jemmy! Damme I will ask—!"
"Ask away, then—and wait for the answer!"
And so it happened that Tristram, stretched in the hospital at Sheerness, with his head to the wall, and thirty wounded men on either side of him, heard in his painless dose a sharp cry, and then a voice that seemed to call him across miles of empty space.
"O! my dear God! Tristram—my son, my son!"
He opened his eyes feebly, smiled, and whispering one word—"Dad!"— sank back into a dreamless slumber.