The doctor and engineer, going fishing, stumbled upon his crumpled form an hour later. The former, a wizened, spectacled little man, bent over him and studied him with eyes that seemed to see everything. He studied the young fellow’s pulse, loosened his shirt, stared into the pupils of his eyes. At last he turned to the other, frowning, and said:
“Fever, and maybe that damn’ typhoid. He’s the sickest man I ever saw.”
Then his voice rose with a flare of anger.
“Say, can’t you keep these fools away from this water?” he asked. “There’s death in it.”
Men, Lost at Sea, Live Through Week of Horror
A harrowing adventure that probably will never leave their minds befell two fishermen of Freeport, L. I., who passed a week in the open sea in a small motor boat, without water or provisions. Caught in a blizzard off the Long Island coast, something went wrong with their compass and they headed out to sea, where they drifted for nearly a week before the schooner, Catherine M., saw their signals of distress and picked them up. The two men—Capt. Bergen Smith and Harry Matthews—had only a small supply of water and a few raw potatoes. On this they lived for the first two days. Then Matthews lost control of himself, drank sea water and became delirious. Raving in delirium, he urged Smith to split a bottle of iodine in a suicide pact. Their boat began to leak, and they ripped the lining from their overcoats to calk the seams. Finally, after a number of ships had passed without seeing them, they were rescued, more dead than alive, by the schooner.
A Night of Horror in the Mortuary
THE MADMAN
By HERBERT HIPWELL