ON THE FEVER SHIP

There were four rails around the ship’s sides, the three lower ones of iron and the one on top of wood, and as he looked between them from the canvas cot he recognized them as the prison-bars which held him in.  Outside his prison lay a stretch of blinding blue water which ended in a line of breakers and a yellow coast with ragged palms.  Beyond that again rose a range of mountain-peaks, and, stuck upon the loftiest peak of all, a tiny block-house.  It rested on the brow of the mountain against the naked sky as impudently as a cracker-box set upon the dome of a great cathedral.

As the transport rode on her anchor-chains, the iron bars around her sides rose and sank and divided the landscape with parallel lines.  From his cot the officer followed this phenomenon with severe, painstaking interest.  Sometimes the wooden rail swept up to the very block-house itself, and for a second of time blotted it from sight.  And again it sank to the level of the line of breakers, and wiped them out of the picture as though they were a line of chalk.

The soldier on the cot promised himself that the next swell of the sea would send the lowest rail climbing to the very top of the palm-trees or, even higher, to the base of the mountains; and when it failed to reach even the palm-trees he felt a distinct sense of ill use, of having been wronged by some one.  There was no other reason for submitting to this existence save these tricks upon the wearisome, glaring landscape; and now, whoever it was who was working them did not seem to be making this effort to entertain him with any heartiness.

It was most cruel.  Indeed, he decided hotly, it was not to be endured; he would bear it no longer, he would make his escape.  But he knew that this move, which could be conceived in a moment’s desperation, could only be carried to success with great strategy, secrecy, and careful cunning.  So he fell back upon his pillow and closed his eyes, as though he were asleep, and then opening them again, turned cautiously, and spied upon his keeper.  As usual, his keeper sat at the foot of the cot turning the pages of a huge paper filled with pictures of the war printed in daubs of tawdry colors.  His keeper was a hard-faced boy without human pity or consideration, a very devil of obstinacy and fiendish cruelty.  To make it worse, the fiend was a person without a collar, in a suit of soiled khaki, with a curious red cross bound by a safety-pin to his left arm.  He was intent upon the paper in his hands; he was holding it between his eyes and his prisoner.  His vigilance had relaxed, and the moment seemed propitious.  With a sudden plunge of arms and legs, the prisoner swept the bed-sheet from him, and sprang at the wooden rail and grasped the iron stanchion beside it.  He had his knee pressed against the top bar and his bare toes on the iron rail beneath it.  Below him the blue water waited for him.  It was cool and dark and gentle and deep.  It would certainly put out the fire in his bones, he thought; it might even shut out the glare of the sun which scorched his eyeballs.