Verrieul picked out four seamen, and they ran aft to the boat, bent over as if by the stupendous roaring of the guns. Above me I heard a penetrating thump. I looked up. One of the sharpshooters sagged in the rope that held him, jerked convulsively: then fell straight down, striking the deck with a crunching sound, and sprawled motionless, his limbs at odd angles, like a broken scarecrow. One of his arms was gone at the shoulder, and from the raw socket gushed blood that trembled with the trembling of the deck. It was Zelph.

I stepped over the widening pool of blood, took him by the remaining arm and lifted him up. He opened his eyes, gasped for breath, and screamed. There was something unreal about the shrillness of the scream. It seemed impossible that it could have come from a person known to me. The Zelph with whom I had grown up was incapable of making such a sound.

He stopped, drew a shuddering, rasping breath, and screamed again. Cap ran to me and got him by the feet. I took the front of his tattered moose-skin jacket, and we dragged him aft.

We carried him into the dark cabin and put him on the table. He gasped and screamed, gasped and screamed, while Doc Means, a dim figure in that low-ceiled room, peeled back Zelph’s jacket to eye the ragged hole from which blood welled in dark jets.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “tie him up!”

Doc, wiping his fingers on a piece of sacking, turned mournful eyes upon me. “He’s gone. His chest’s caved in. There’s ribs in his lungs, and nothing to be done. Seeing you’re a friend of his, maybe you’d like me to help him get it over with.”

“Get it over with? Get it over with?”

“Every time he breathes,” Doc said, “he’ll scream. He’ll scream till all the blood’s out of him. He’ll scream a long time, maybe. You better let me help him.”

“Help him? Let you help him?”

“Yes,” Doc said. “With opium. Or a knife. A knife’s quicker.”

We stared at him.

“It’s the best way to treat him,” Doc said mildly. “The best and kindest. You go on deck, both of you.”

Zelph screamed once more. The sound was horrible.

Keeping tight hold of me, Cap turned me toward the stairs and pushed me on deck, into the thundering tumult that surged, like invisible waves, over the rim of spruce butts that ringed us. One of Cap’s marines, clutching his jaw-bone with a bloody hand, stumbled against us, moaning.

“Here!” Cap said. “What’s the matter?”

The marine removed his hand from his face to let us see a three-inch splinter protruding from his cheek.

Cap’s comment was contemptuous. “What you going to the hospital for that for?”

“To have it took out,” the marine said angrily.