He cooked his supper, ate, watched the sun drop behind the encircling rim of firs.  Then he lay on a cushion in the cockpit until dark came and the green shore of the little bay grew dim and then black and the dusky water under the yawl’s counter was split with the phosphorescent flashes of darting fish.

Across a peninsula, on the weather side of the Cape, he could hear the seas thud and the surf growl like the distant booming of heavy batteries.  Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their mark.  But neither of these sounds held the menace of the sounds of which they reminded him.  He listened to those diapasons and thin trebles and was strangely soothed.  And at last he grew sleepy and turned in to his bunk.

Some time in the night he had a weird sort of dream.  He was falling, falling swiftly from a great height in the air.  On the tail of his plane rode a German, with a face like those newspaper caricatures of the Kaiser, who shot at him with a trench mortar—­boom—­boom—­boom—­boom!

Thompson found himself sitting up in his bunk.  The queer dream had given place to reality, in which the staccato explosions continued.  As he put his face to an open porthole a narrow, searching ray of uncommon brilliance flashed over his yawl and picked up the shore beyond.  Back of the searchlight lifted the red, green, and white triangle of running lights laid dead for him.  It sheered a little.  The brilliant ray blinked out.  He saw a dim bulk, a pale glimmer through cabin windows, heard the murmur of voices and the rattle of anchor chain running through hawse pipe.  Then he closed his eyes and slept again.

He rose with the sun.  Beside him lay a sturdily built motor tug.  A man leaned on the towing bitts aft, smoking a pipe, gazing at the yawl.  Twenty feet would have spanned the distance between them.

Thompson emerged into the cockpit.  The air was cool and he was fully dressed.  At sight of the uniform with the insignia on sleeve and collar the man straightened up, came to attention, lifted his hand smartly in the military salute—­the formality tempered by a friendly grin.  Thompson saw then that the man had a steel hook where his left hand should have been.  Also a livid scar across his cheek where a bullet or shrapnel had plowed.

“It’s a fine morning after a wild night,” Thompson broke the conversational ice.

“It was a wild night outside and no mistake,” the man replied.  “We took cover about midnight—­got tired of plowing into it, and wasn’t too keen for wallowing through them rips off the Cape.  Say, are you back long from over there?”

“Not long,” Thompson replied.  “I left England two weeks ago.”

“How’s it going?”

“We’re over the hump,” Thompson told him.  “They’re outgunned now.  The Americans are there in force.  And we have them beaten in the air at last.  You know what that means if you’ve been across.”