He scarcely even glanced at the girl, and when he did so it was to give some curt directions as from a surgeon to a nurse. Yet she felt strangely happy and triumphant, for at last he had been forced to recognise and to demand her assistance. She felt herself necessary to him, and the terse orders, involving her co-operation in the work of succour, seemed to her a tacit admission of the fact. Henceforth she would at least be an entity in his eyes; he would have to acknowledge her existence, even if he resented it.
After the Captain and Mr. Dykes had gone; throughout the whole night, indeed, the girl remained at her post. She found plenty to do; giving cooling drinks to those whose throats were parched with fever, readjusting dressings which had worked out of place, and performing the hundred and one offices which fall to the lot of a watcher of the sick. At intervals during the night the mate or Smith would enter the dim hold, which now reeked with the pungent odour of antiseptics, to proffer their services, and once Mr. Dykes tried to persuade her to turn in. But she rejected the suggestion indignantly, and ordered him out of the place, whereupon he departed sheepishly. At about five o'clock in the morning Calamity looked in again and seemed surprised to find her there.
"How long have you been on watch?" he asked.
"Since you left," she answered.
"Then you'd no right to. Dykes or Smith should have told off a man to keep watch. Get off to your bunk. I don't want a sick woman aboard."
Without a word she left the sick-bay, and then, for the first time, realised how exhausted she really was. Without troubling to undress, she flung herself upon the bunk and was asleep almost before her head touched the pillow.
All that day and the next as well, the Hawk chugged her way in a northerly direction, her speed never exceeding six knots and sometimes falling below that. How McPhulach had contrived to patch up her engines sufficiently to do even so much was a mystery no one but himself could have explained. Still, they might break down again at any moment, and it was absolutely necessary to find some port where the repairs could be carried out more thoroughly, and with the proper appliances. In the meantime much of the damage sustained in the encounter with the yacht had been repaired. Paint and canvas had done much to cover the effects of shot and shell, and outwardly, at least, the Hawk had resumed her normal appearance. But it was merely superficial, like the creams and cosmetics used by a faded beauty to hide the ravages of time. In fact she was, as Smith put it, "a whited bloomin' sepulchre."
On the second morning, as Miss Fletcher was going down to the hold, she met Mr. Dykes.
"The skipper's orders are that you're to take four-hour watches, so that you'll have a rest between each spell," he said.
She merely nodded and passed into the hold. The dim, yellow glow of the lanterns was fading in the growing daylight, making the surroundings more gloomy and depressing than even the half-light. She moved from bed to bed with noiseless steps, performing various little services for the sufferers. One man, who knew that he was dying, asked her to write down and witness his last will and testament—a curiously pathetic document—and for another she wrote a letter that was to be posted at the first port the ship touched. In a far corner she found a man making feeble efforts to undo the front of his shirt. He was too weak to speak, and, wondering what he wanted, the girl unbuttoned it to find a small silver crucifix suspended from a piece of string round his neck. Divining his need, she placed it in his hand, and the coarse, misshapen fingers closed over the Symbol; thus he died.