She went down, nose first.  Those in the starboard boats saw her stand on end for full five minutes, screws spinning, before a muffled detonation blew the bowels out of her and sucked her down like a plunging arrow.

Destroyers and launches from some of the cruisers were busy amid the wreckage where here, on a spar, some stunned form clung like a limpet, and there, a-bob in the curling seas, a swimmer in his life-suit tossed under the wintry sky.

There were men on rafts, too, and several clinging to hatches; there was not much loss of life, considering.

Toward midday a sea-plane which had been releasing depth-bombs and hovering eagerly above the wide iridescent and spreading stain, sheered shoreward and shot along the coast.

There was a dead man afloat in a cave, rocking there rather peacefully in his life-suit—­or at least they supposed him to be dead.

But on a chance they signalled the discovery to a distant trawler, then soared upward for a general coup de l’oeil, turned there aloft like a seahawk for a while, sheering in widening spirals, and finally, high in the grey sky, set a steady course for parts unknown.

Meanwhile a boat from the trawler fished out McKay, wrapped him in red-hot blankets, pried open his blue lips, and tried to fill him full of boiling rum.  Then he came to life.  But those honest fishermen knew he had gone stark mad because he struck at the pannikin of steaming rum and cursed them vigorously for their kindness.  And only a madman could so conduct himself toward a pannikin of steaming rum.  They understood that perfectly.  And, understanding it, they piled more hot blankets upon the struggling form of Kay McKay and roped him to his bunk.

Toward evening, becoming not only coherent but frightfully emphatic, they released McKay.

“What’s this damn place?” he shouted.

“Strathlone Firth,” they said.

“That’s my country!” he raged.  “I want to go ashore!”

They were quite ready to be rid of the cracked Yankee, and told him so.

“And the boats?  How about them?” he demanded.

“All in the Firth, sir.”

“Any women lost?”

“None, sir.”

At that, struggling into his clothes, he began to shed gold sovereigns from his ripped money-belt all over the cabin.  Weatherbeaten fingers groped to restore the money to him.  But it was quite evident that the young man was mad.  He wouldn’t take it.  And in his crazy way he seemed very happy, telling them what fine lads they were and that not only Scotland but the world ought to be proud of them, and that he was about to begin to live the most wonderful life that any man had ever lived as soon as he got ashore.

“Because,” he explained, as he swung off and dropped into the small boat alongside, “I’ve taken a look into hell and I’ve had a glimpse of heaven, but the earth has got them both stung to death, and I like it and I’m going to settle down on it and live awhile.  You don’t get me, do you?” They did not.