But the surprising thing was that neither vessel was vitally injured. They could both steam, though slowly, and by dint of plugging the more serious holes and keeping the pumps going, they were still tolerably seaworthy. How they had escaped from the inferno without being blown clean out of the water was nothing short of a miracle.
Casualties had been heavy. Wooten went about with his arm in a sling and a bandage round his head; but his hurts, though painful, were not sufficiently severe to incapacitate him for duty. The first lieutenant had not been so lucky, for he, peppered badly by a shell, had been confined to his bunk with more serious injuries.
The eight dead had been buried at dawn, and now the wounded lay in their hammocks on the battered mess-deck under the forecastle. Some of the slighter cases, with their hurts bandaged, were smoking cigarettes and talking quite cheerfully; others were asleep.
Pincher Martin was one of them. He had three neat little splinter-wounds in his back—three insignificant-looking and trivial little punctures which caused Brown, the surgeon-probationer, to purse his lips and to frown in his most professional manner when first he saw them. 'D'you feel any pain?' he had asked.
'Not unless I moves, sir,' the patient had answered with a wan smile, his tightly compressed lips giving the lie to his words.
An operation was impossible, and they dressed the wounds as best they could and made him comfortable; but the slivers of steel somewhere inside him hurt atrociously, and it was all he could do to refrain from moaning when they touched him. So Brown, seeing how things stood, dozed him with morphia, and poor Pincher, with his young face unnaturally haggard, drawn, and very white, was presently slumbering as peacefully as a child.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CONCLUSION.
I.
'Am safe,' the telegram said tersely, in Billings's ungrammatical English. 'Martin wounded, progressing favourable.—Joshua.'