“Hardest thing I ever had to do, but he was our captain and we had to obey. ‘Getting through with that information may save thousands of lives,’ Tommy told us. He was like that, Tommy was. By staying we might’ve saved him, but he wouldn’t hear of it when so much was at stake.”
“But couldn’t you have brought him away with you?” she wailed.
“He was too ill to sit up. That burning sun would have finished him in a few hours, even if the Japs hadn’t got us.”
“Oh—then they did get you before you came through with the information?”
He was silent a moment as if gathering strength for the awful memories.
“Picked us up at sea,” he said finally. “We had water, food and navigation instruments and might have made it all right.”
She feared the thoughts of what followed would be too harrowing, and stopped him there. “I’ll go get you some milk,” she said. “Then you must rest before you talk any more.”
Nancy dared not weary Vernon with more questioning just then, so was silent while she fed him the milk through a tube. The information he had already given was broken at intervals for him to gather strength for the effort.
“You must sleep some more,” she suggested when he had taken the nourishment, “and I’ll come back to see you again this afternoon.”
For the first time in many weeks Nancy found it impossible to sleep when she was finally stretched on her cot. She often used a blinder across her eyes to shut out the glare when she had difficulty sleeping in the day, but this time it did no good at all. She could not stop the working of her troubled mind, even though her tired body cried out for rest. Nor did she like to take anything to make herself sleep, for she knew, under the present stress, how easy it would be to get into such a habit.