"You doubted my courage, maybe?" I asked.
"No," he said to that, "not your courage—never your courage. But your good intentions—yes."
We were lying with our chests across the buoy, and we could easily see the ship, and we knew that the ship could see us so long as our buoy light kept burning—her whistles were blowing regularly to let us know that. But she would have to have a care in manoeuvring because of the other ships so near, and it was too rough to lower a boat for us.
Then at last the blue light of our buoy burned itself out, for which we were almost thankful—it smelled so. And then night came, and darkness.
Tossing high up and then down, like a swing in the sea, we went, lying on our chests across the buoy one time and hanging on by a grip of our fingers another time. And when the sea wasn't washing over my head I would shout; though I doubt if, in the hissing of the sea and the roaring of the wind, my voice carried ten feet beyond the buoy.
By and by a search-light burned through the dark onto us. Meagher was by then in tough shape. For the last half-hour I'd been holding him onto the buoy, and it was another half-hour before they could launch a boat. We had been three hours in the water, and I was glad to be back aboard. It is one thing not to mind dying; it is another thing to fight and fight and have to keep on fighting after your strength is gone. When a man's strength goes a lot of his courage goes with it.
Meagher's courage was still with him. He protested against being taken to the sick bay, but there they took him; and when he left the sick bay, it was to take a ship for home. I went to see him the last day. On my leaving him, he said: "I'm taking back a lot I said to you. If you had been washed over I doubt if I'd gone after you."
He would have gone after me—or anybody else. And I told him so, my heart thumping as I said it, for I'd come to have a great liking for him.
"I still doubt it," he said. "Anyway, I owe my life—what there is left of it—to you."