Another eternity went by. Slow daylight battled long with the mists of night and fog. The girl sat with her arms round the rigid figure of Julian Grant; but for that he would have slipped away like that other—Did any one know besides Newcomb of the gray head lying face downward in the wash that was sucking and slapping to and fro in the bottom of the boat?
Newcomb himself lost all sense of time in those intervals of partial unconsciousness too full of suffering to deserve the name of sleep, but he recollected the timbre of the voice that called out something inarticulate in German just before Gillow shouted, "Light! a light!"
And there it was, far away to eastward, infinitesimal, but steady, a gleam. At first it looked as if it might be the morning star shining through the breaking fog-veil, red like Mars. Then, changing like only man-made brightness, the light showed green.
The excitement among those who still were conscious bore its touch of mania. Where the captain's stern call to order might have failed, the question, "Who knows if it isn't a submarine?" sobered the most hopeful.
"Whatever it is, it's coming nearer!" Nan Ellis cried the news at Julian's irresponsive ear. Out of the cage of despair her flagging voice soared in a rapture of recovered faith: "Light, Julian! A light!"
And now there stood out against the streak of dawn the hull and funnels of a steamer. All eyes watched that phantom ship as though for an instant to lose sight of her would be tantamount to letting her go to the bottom. They held her to her holy purpose by that thread of vision, the optic nerve. And to those passionately watchful eyes the course of the steamer had seemed to lie in a dead reckoning right across the lifeboat. She couldn't miss them. Suddenly her course diverged; she was bearing to the west! Newcomb saw the captain's hand shake as he lighted a signal, his only and most precious Coston Light. Ah, she got that! Another feeble cry went up from the lifeboat, for the steamer slackened speed, she turned. She had altered her course for fear of running the lifeboat down. Now perhaps she could see—
Anyway, eyes in the lifeboat could see—the steamer sheering off to southward. The captain and the engineer shot off their pistols. Others in the boat, not too far gone, screamed like creatures on the rack. It wasn't tragic so much as horrible. They howled like animals.
The ship went on. She faded. She was gone.
"They're afraid it's a trap," said the engineer. "You didn't know it, but we're a decoy-boat, ha, ha! Signals of distress? Ha! ha! Too thin. We're a submarine. Didn't you know?"
More than men and boats had been sacrificed in the war.