We transferred to a troop-ship standing out in the bay with all possible speed.
Still with the gloom hanging over everything we steamed out and every man was dead tired.
However, I found Hawk, and we decided not to sleep down below with the others, all crowded together and stinking in the dirty interior of the ship.
We took our hammocks up on deck and slung them forward from the handrail near one of the great anchors.
I had a purpose in doing this. I had no intention of going to sleep. By taking note of a certain star which had appeared just to the right of a cross-spar, and by noticing its change of position, I was enabled to guess with some exactitude the course we were laying.
For the first two or three hours the star and the mast kept a perfectly unchangeable position.
I woke up after dozing for some minutes, and taking up my old stand near the companion-way again took my star observation. But this time the star had swept right round and was the other side of the mast. We had changed our course from south-west to north. Just then Hawk came up the companion-way, no doubt from a bottle-hunt down below.
“It's—Salonika!” said he.
“We've turned almost due north in the last quarter of an hour.”
“I know it,—been down to the stokers' bunks—it's Salonika—another new landing.”