Of course those had not been his only protests. McCullum had been as angry as his muddled condition would allow when he emerged from his narcotic to find he was under the treatment of the man who had shot him. He had struggled against his weakness and his bandages. It had called for Hornblower’s personal intervention—fortunately Atropos was clear of the harbour mouth when McCullum regained consciousness—to calm him down. “It’s a blackguard trick to pursue an affair of honour after an exchange of shots,” Hornblower had said, and “It’s the Doctor who’s attending to you, not the Baron,” and then the clinching argument “Don’t be a fool, man. There’s no other surgeon within fifty miles. Do you want to die?” So McCullum had yielded, and had submitted his tortured body to Eisenbeiss’s ministrations, perhaps deriving some comfort from the ignoble things the doctor had to do for him.

And now all that spirit had gone. McCullum was a very sick man. He closed his eyes as Eisenbeiss laid his hand on his forehead. The pale lips muttered, and Hornblower, stooping, could only hear disjointed phrases. There was something about “fuses under water.” McCullum was thinking, then, of the salvage operation ahead. Hornblower looked up and met Eisenbeiss’s eyes. There was deep concern in them, and there was the least perceptible shake of the head. Eisenbeiss thought McCullum was going to die.

“It hurts—it hurts,” said McCullum, moaning a little.

He moved restlessly, and Eisenbeiss’s large powerful hands eased him into a more comfortable position on his left side. Hornblower noticed that Eisenbeiss laid one hand, as if inquiringly, over McCullum’s right shoulderblade, and then lower down, towards the short ribs, and McCullum moaned again. There was no change in the gravity of Eisenbeiss’s expression.

This was horrible. It was horrible to see this magnificently constructed creature dying. And it was equally horrible that Hornblower was aware that his deep sympathy was allayed with concern for himself. He could not imagine how he would carry through the salvage operation with McCullum dead, or even with McCullum as helpless as he was at present. He would return emptyhanded, to face Collingwood’s wrath and contempt. What was the use of all his endeavours? Hornblower suddenly boiled with exasperation at the duelling convention which had claimed the life of a valuable man and at the same time had imperilled his own professional reputation. Within himself he was a whirlpool of emotions conflicting with each other.

“Land! Land ho! Land on the starboard bow!”

The cry came ringing down from the fore topmast head. No one could hear it without at least a little excitement. McCullum opened his eyes and turned his head again, but Eisenbeiss, stooping over him, endeavoured to soothe him. Hornblower’s place was aft, and he turned away from the bed and walked back, trying to restrain himself from appearing too eager. Turner was already there, brought up from his watch below at the cry, and by the lee bulwark the other officers were rapidly assembling in a group.

“A good landfall, sir,” said Turner.

“An hour earlier than I was led to expect,” answered Hornblower.

“The current sets northerly here with steady winds from the West, sir,” said Turner. “We’ll raise Atairo in Rhodes to port soon, and then we’ll have a crossbearing.”

“Yes,” replied Hornblower. He was aware of his shortness of manner, but only dimly aware of its cause; he was uneasy with a sailing master on board who knew more about local conditions than he did, although that sailing master had been assigned to him to save him from uneasiness.

Atropos was shouldering her way valiantly through the short but steep seas that came hurrying forward to assail her port bow. Her motion was easy; she was carrying exactly the right amount of sail for that wind. Turner put a telescope in his pocket and walked forward to ascend the main shrouds, while Hornblower stood on the weather side with the wind blowing against his sunburned cheeks. Turner came aft again, his smile denoting selfsatisfaction.

“That’s the Seven Capes, sir,” he said. “Two points on the starboard bow.”

“There’s a northerly set here, you say?” asked Hornblower.

“Yes, sir.”

Hornblower walked over and looked at the compass, and up at the trim of the sails. The northerly set would help, and the wind was coming from the southward of west, but there was no sense in going unnecessarily far to leeward.

“Mr. Still! You can come closer to the wind than this. Brace her up.”

He did not want to have to beat his way in at the last, and he was making allowance for the danger of the current setting in on Cape Kum.

Now here was the doctor, touching his hat to demand attention.

“What is it, doctor?” asked Hornblower.

The hands were hauling on the maintack.

“May I speak to you, sir?”

That was exactly what he was doing, and at a moment by no means opportune. But of course what he wanted was a chance to speak to him in privacy, and not on this bustling deck.

“It’s about the patient, sir,” supplemented Eisenbeiss. “I think it is very important.”

“Oh, very well,” said Hornblower, restraining himself from using bad language. He led the way down into the cabin, and seated himself to face the doctor. “Well? What do you have to say?”

Eisenbeiss was nervous, that was plain.

“I have formed a theory, sir.”

He failed, as ever, with the “th” sound, and the word was so unusual and his pronunciation of it was so odd chat Hornblower had to think for a moment before he could guess what it was Eisenbeiss had said.

“And what is this theory?”

“It is about the position of the bullet, sir,” answered Eisenbeiss; he, too, took a moment to digest what was the English pronunciation of the word.

“The garrison surgeon at Malta told me it was in the chest cavity. Do you know any more than that?”

That expression “chest cavity” was an odd one, but the garrison surgeon had used it. It implied an empty space, and was an obvious misnomer. Lungs and heart and the great bloodvessels must fill that cavity full.

“I believe it may not be in there at all, sir,” said Eisenbeiss, clearly taking a plunge.

“Indeed?” This might be exceedingly important news if it were true. “Then why is he so ill?”

Now that Eisenbeiss had committed himself he became voluble again. Explanations poured out of him, accompanied by jerky gestures. But the explanations were hard to follow. In this highly technical matter Eisenbeiss had been thinking in his native language even more than usual, and now he was having to translate into technical terms unfamiliar to him and still more unfamiliar to Hornblower, who grasped despairingly at one contorted sentence.

“You think that the bullet, after breaking those ribs, may have bounced off again?” he asked. At the last moment he substituted the word “bounce” for “ricochet” in the hope of retaining clarity.

“Yes, sir. Bullets often do that.”

“And where do you say you think it went then?”

Eisenbeiss tried to stretch his left hand far under his right armpit; his body was too bulky to permit it to go far enough to make his demonstration quite complete.

“Under the scapula, sir—the—the shoulderblade.”

“Land ho! Land on the port bow?”

Hornblower heard the cry come down through the skylight from above. That must be Rhodes they had sighted. Here they were heading into Rhodes Channel, and he was down below talking about ribs and scapulas. And yet the one was as important as the other.

“I can’t stay down here much longer, doctor. Tell me why you think this is the case?”

Eisenbeiss fell into explanation again. He talked about the patient’s fever, and about his comparative wellbeing the morning after he had been wounded, and about the small amount of blood he had spat up. He was in the full flood of his talk when a knock at the door interrupted him.