"We've got to consider how we'll ever get out of here, if we can't run this tug's engines..."
"We're stuck! We're stuck!" declared the Englishman miserably. "I don't see why I don't go down and be a hog again... we'll finally starve... Somehow I had a mind to die sober... God knows why I ever came on such a junket."
"Starve nothing. We'll get out somehow. We can fish and eat seaweed and distill our own water. I can make a still. And you'll get over that appetite. Bound to—can't last always."
Smith relapsed into silence, staring over the dying colors of the sea. Madden tried to think of simple remedies to abate a drunkard's appetite for alcohol. He had heard of apples, lemon juice, but both were as unobtainable as the gold cure itself.
"How long have you been like this?" he asked at last.
"Been bad two or three years. Drank some all my life. My governor taught it to me when I was a baby. Then when I got older if I went too far he kicked. Naturally I intended to stop in time, till I slipped in deep."
Leonard nodded understandingly. "It always gets a nervous high-strung fellow. The better stuff you are the harder it hits you."
Caradoc stared moodily seaward as he continued his recollections.
"The governor kept warning me. I don't believe he'd ever have kicked me out, but he died. Then they cashiered me—took my commission—and my family let me go, too... Well, I can't blame 'em."
"Your commission—in the army?"