But the fever would not let Channing taste of the food when they placed it at his elbow, and even as he pushed it away, his mind was still fixed upon the paragraph before him.  He wrote, sprawling across the desk, covering page upon page with giant hieroglyphics, lighting cigarette after cigarette at the end of the last one, but with his thoughts far away, and, as he performed the act, staring uncomprehendingly at the captain’s colored calendar pinned on the wall before him.  For many months later the Battle of Santiago was associated in his mind with a calendar for the month of July, illuminated by a colored picture of six white kittens in a basket.

At three o’clock Channing ceased writing and stood up, shivering and shaking with a violent chill.  He cursed himself for this weakness, and called aloud for the captain.

“I can’t stop now,” he cried.  He seized the rough fist of the captain as a child clings to the hand of his nurse.

“Give me something,” he begged.  “Medicine, quinine, give me something to keep my head straight until it’s finished.  Go, quick,” he commanded.  His teeth were chattering, and his body jerked with sharp, uncontrollable shudders.  The captain ran, muttering, to his medicine-chest.

“We’ve got one drunken man on board,” he said to the mate, “and now we’ve got a crazy one.  You mark my words, he’ll go off his head at sunset.”

But at sunset Channing called to him and addressed him sanely.  He held in his hand a mass of papers carefully numbered and arranged, and he gave them up to the captain as though it hurt him to part with them.

“There’s the story,” he said.  “You’ve got to do the rest.  I can’t—­I--I’m going to be very ill.”  He was swaying as he spoke.  His eyes burned with the fever, and his eyelids closed of themselves.  He looked as though he had been heavily drugged.

“You put that on the wire at Port Antonio,” he commanded, faintly; “pay the tolls to Kingston.  From there they are to send it by way of Panama, you understand, by the Panama wire.”

“Panama!” gasped the captain.  “Good Lord, that’s two dollars a word.”  He shook out the pages in his hand until he found the last one.  “And there’s sixty-eight pages here,” he expostulated.  “Why the tolls will be five thousand dollars!” Channing dropped feebly to the bench of the chart-room and fell in a heap, shivering and trembling.

“I guess it’s worth it,” he murmured, drowsily.

The captain was still staring at the last page.

“But—­but, look here,” he cried, “you’ve—­you’ve signed Mr. Keating’s name to it!  ‘James R. Keating.’  You’ve signed his name to it!”

Channing raised his head from his folded arms and stared at him dully.

“You don’t want to get Keating in trouble, do you?” he asked with patience.  “You don’t want the C. P. to know why he couldn’t write the best story of the war?  Do you want him to lose his job?  Of course you don’t.  Well, then, let it go as his story.  I won’t tell, and see you don’t tell, and Keating won’t remember.”