seat and let young Jim Furman, who thinks I'm a has-been and he's the
one white hope, begin to draw my pay. You can't beat those rifles. When
the boys get to carrying them, old Francis Joseph's ghost'll weep. Pity,
ain't it, we didn't get on board by noon?" he digressed sociably. "I
could've found something to do ashore the four hours I've been twiddling
my thumbs here, and I guess you could too. Hardest, though, on our
friends the newspaper boys. Did you know they were out there waiting to
take a flashlight film? Fact. They do it nowadays every time a big liner
leaves. Then if we sink, all they have to do is run it, with 'Doomed
Ship Leaving New York Harbor' underneath."

To his shocked surprise I laughed at the information. My appetite
was unimpaired as I pursued my meal. Trains in which others ride may
telescope and steamers may take one's acquaintances to watery graves,
but to normal people the chance of any catastrophe overtaking them
personally must always seem gratifyingly far-fetched and vague.

"Think it's funny, do you?" my new friend reproached me. "Well, I don't;
and neither did the folks who had cabins taken and who threw them up
last week when they heard how the _San Pietro_ went down on this same
route. We're five plumb idiots--that's what we are--five crazy lunatics!
I'd never have come a step, not with wild horses dragging me if it
hadn't been for Jim Furman being pretty near popeyed, looking for a
chance to cut me out and sail. We've got fifteen hundred reservists
downstairs, and a cargo of contraband. What do you know about that as a
prize for a submarine?"

"Well," I said vaingloriously. "I can swim."

My eyes were wandering, for the girl in the fur coat had entered, with