He sat up in his bunk. His head seemed to be splitting. Everything in view was slowly moving to and fro with a semicircular motion.
"What the deuce have I been up to?" he soliloquized. "Where was I last night? By Jove, I must have had another touch of that rotten malaria."
Presently the erratic movements of his surroundings quieted down. He became aware that Denbigh and Stirling, lying in their bunks on the other side of the cabin, were still sleeping and breathing stertorously.
"Now how in the name of goodness did those fellows get into my cabin?" asked the puzzled Irishman, for he was under the impression that he was on board the Nichi Maru. "Has someone been having a rag?"
From the alley-way came the sound of voices. He listened. The speakers were making use of a foreign language. It was not the soft, pleasing Japanese tongue—something harsh and guttural.
"German!" ejaculated O'Hara. "By my blessed namesake I remember it all now."
He leapt from his bunk and, crossing the cabin, shook Denbigh by the shoulders. The Sub's only reply was a grunt of semi-conscious expostulation. O'Hara turned his attentions to the Scot.
"Fore!" muttered Stirling, engrossed in the joys of a round of golf in dreamland.
"More like twelve, be jabbers," retorted O'Hara. "The sun's well over the fore-yard. Show a leg and shine, you lazy bounder."
The discipline imbued in the old Dartmouth College was too strong to resist the nautical invitation to get up. Stirling rolled from his bunk—fortunately it was the underneath one—and subsided heavily upon the floor.