Four of the enemy’s squadron had struck their colors, two were on the beach, broken and burning, two had sunk to the bottom of the sea, two were in abject flight.  Three battle-ships were hammering them with thirteen-inch guns.  The battle was won.

“It’s all over,” Channing said.  His tone questioned his own words.

The captain of the tugboat was staring at the face of his silver watch, as though it were a thing bewitched.  He was pale and panting.  He looked at Channing, piteously, as though he doubted his own senses, and turned the face of the watch toward him.

“Twenty minutes!” Channing said.  “Good God!  Twenty minutes!”

He had been to hell and back again in twenty minutes.  He had seen an empire, which had begun with Christopher Columbus and which had spread over two continents, wiped off the map in twenty minutes.  The captain gave a sudden cry of concern.  “Mr. Keating,” he gasped.  “Oh, Lord, but I forgot Mr. Keating.  Where is Mr. Keating?”

“I went below twice,” Channing answered.  “He’s insensible.  See what you can do with him, but first—­take me to the Iowa.  The Consolidated Press will want the ‘facts.’”

In the dark cabin the captain found Keating on the floor, where Channing had dragged him, and dripping with the water which Channing had thrown in his face.  He was breathing heavily, comfortably.  He was not concerned with battles.

With a megaphone, Channing gathered his facts from an officer of the Iowa, who looked like a chimney-sweep, and who was surrounded by a crew of half-naked pirates, with bodies streaked with sweat and powder.

Then he ordered all steam for Port Antonio, and, going forward to the chart-room, seated himself at the captain’s desk, and, pushing the captain’s charts to the floor, spread out his elbows, and began to write the story of his life.

In the joy of creating it, he was lost to all about him.  He did not know that the engines, driven to the breaking-point, were filling the ship with their groans and protests, that the deck beneath his feet was quivering like the floor of a planing-mill, nor that his fever was rising again, and feeding on his veins.  The turmoil of leaping engines and of throbbing pulses was confused with the story he was writing, and while his mind was inflamed with pictures of warring battle-ships, his body was swept by the fever, which overran him like an army of tiny mice, touching his hot skin with cold, tingling taps of their scampering feet.

From time to time the captain stopped at the door of the chart-room and observed him in silent admiration.  To the man who with difficulty composed a letter to his family, the fact that Channing was writing something to be read by millions of people, and more rapidly than he could have spoken the same words, seemed a superhuman effort.  He even hesitated to interrupt it by an offer of food.