"At twelve o'clock it was pretty serious. The Chief had the Second out to help with the pumps and sent me to call the old Third. It was his watch on the main engines, you see, twelve to four. Our berth was flooded. There was a couple of inches of water on the floor, and at every sea the water flew through the leaky joints of the dead-lights, all over old Croasan. To and fro on the floor my slippers were floating and a torn magazine swam into the room from the alleyway as I opened the door. The oil from the lamp was dripping on to the drawer tops, and every time she gave a deeper roll the light flared. I put the magazine under it to catch the drip, and as I did so I caught sight of a picture in it, a picture of two men standing on the deck of a ship in a storm. Underneath were the words, 'I think she's sinking.' Curious, wasn't it? That's just what I thought. I turned to old Croasan. He lay in his bunk just as he had come off watch at six o'clock, his dungarees shining with grease, his tattooed arms grey with dirt. He looked eighty years old as he lay there with his bald head against the bottle rack, the pouches under his eyes marking dark shadows on his creased cheeks. I shook him, and he opened his eyes for a second. I hardly knew what I was doing, I was so crazy with sickness and bruises and incessant toil. 'Mr. Croasan,' I shouted at him. 'Eh!' says he, without opening his eyes. 'Oh,' I said, 'I--I think she's sinking.' He opened his eyes for about two seconds and then said to me in a terrible voice just as a big sea crashed over our heads and the ports spurted, 'Let her sink and be damned!' he says and never stirred. I left him there. I ran back to the engine room. I felt I couldn't stay and argue the point with a man who would not make a fight for us, for himself. "The Chief decided to cut holes in the suction pipe just under the water-line. Then when the pumps sucked them clear, we bound them up with jointing and cut more holes lower down. Oh! it was grand! For fourteen hours we went on doing that, up to our shoulders in the bilge, the grease caking on us in a fresh layer every time we climbed out to get something in the store. The weather eased a little off Finisterre and we got her righted. We went up to the Chief's room to have a nip of whisky. "'Ye see,' said the Second. 'Ye see, mister, there's some as dinna care.' "Old Croasan came out of the bunk when the trouble was over. I felt too proud of what I'd been through to be hard on the poor old chap, proud of being in the thick of it. I was seeing life at last. This was what I'd come for. 'Ah,' says the Chief, his glass eye fixing me over his whisky glass, 'you'll be marked if you stay on the _Corydon_.'