Five Passengers from Lisbon

The glow and redness slowly grew.

All of them saw it and watched it—dully, at intervals, preoccupied first with that increasing and frightful struggle to keep alive another minute—through another wave.

It was Luther who first said it was a ship; and then they shifted about confusedly, all of them searching in the dim gray light for rockets. They found them in a small locker along with the inadequate supply of dry rations and brackish water, compass and knife and tarpaulin with which the lifeboat had been sparsely equipped. Mickey sent up the rockets. Long streaks of flame curled up above the lifeboat. Some time about then Alfred Castiogne collapsed; he lay in the stern and Luther and one of the seamen moved him. Luther again took an oar, while one of the seamen, the one with the thick strong silhouette, huddled over in the dim light and worked on Castiogne to revive him and did not succeed, for at length he gave up and tried to arrange the third mate fairly comfortably against a seat and went back savagely to rowing. The ship lay dead ahead and had the strange rosy radiance now all about her, but it was not fire.

Marcia was past anything so human, so vital as hope. She watched as if from delirium, as if it didn't matter to her. She heard the men talk; she tried to help in a fumbling way to find the rockets; she saw the streaks of fire curve up at last over the distant ship—above the ship and above that strange rosy radiance, acknowledging their own signals.

Daisy Belle said in a faraway, hoarse voice that mumbled the words: "It's a hospital ship. See the Red Cross on the side."

Mickey was then just ahead of them. He jerked around toward Daisy Belle. His face looked queer too, stony and drawn, his dark eyelashes coated with brine, his lips purple. His mouth was stiff from cold, too; his words were barely intelligible: "American—is she American?"

Marcia could have told them both yes. She knew the hospital ships; she'd seen them often at Marseilles. Words stirred faintly in her consciousness; but not strongly enough to induce numbed muscles and nerves to speech. As a matter of fact, when they were picked up thirty minutes later Marcia was only vaguely aware of it. She knew when she was slung over a shoulder and carried up a swaying Jacob's ladder. She knew when they lifted her from a litter to a bunk and warmth and returning circulation made her cry with pain.

The others were in various stages of shock from exposure and cold, except for Alfred Castiogne, who was dead.

He had not, however, died of exposure.

"This man," said the doctor who examined him, looking at the knife wound in his back, "was murdered."