Hodges was sleepy. He hoped that Evans would finish his questioning soon and let them go back to bed. It was exciting, of course, to have a man disappear, and he wondered what had happened. Hodges could not believe that Duval had fallen overboard. That was too unlikely. That couldn’t happen to anyone he had talked to such a short time before.
“The decks are quite slick,” commented the Major. “It’s easy to slip on them; all you have to do is slip and that’s the end.”
“I can’t believe it happened that way,” said the Chaplain. “He must be somewhere around the ship. There must be a lot of places where he could be.” The Chaplain, like Hodges, could not grasp sudden death.
“This isn’t a big ship,” said the Major serenely. “They must’ve looked everywhere.”
“That water must be awfully cold,” said Hodges, beginning to feel awake.
The Chaplain shuddered and muttered something under his breath.
“Almost instant death,” said the Major. “Almost instant death,” he repeated softly. The Chaplain crossed himself. Hodges wondered how the water must have felt: the killing waves.
Evans and Martin walked in from the galley. Evans looked worried.
“Did any of you people see Duval tonight?” he asked.
The Major and the Chaplain said they had not.