Trevor heard the cry as one half asleep hears the summons to awake; he wondered why cox didn’t speak louder; but he brought his wandering thoughts back the next instant and bore doggedly at his oar. Yes, he could still row; one more stroke; now, yet one more; and still another. It seemed as though each must be his last, and yet, when it was done, strength still remained for another, weaker, slower, but still another. Ever since the half-mile had been passed he had been on the verge of collapse. He was faint and weak and dizzy; the blue sky and glistening water were merged in his failing sight into one strange expanse of awful, monotonous blue that revolved behind him in mighty sweeps like a monster cyclorama. Often it was dotted with craft that trailed soft, gray vapor behind them; often the lights were suddenly turned quite out, and the world was left in impenetrable blackness, and he closed his eyes and was glad. “_Four! Four! What’s the matter? Brace up, man!_” And then he opened his aching eyes again, slowly, unwillingly, to find the world for the moment normal; to see the muscles of Waters’s neck straining like cords; to see a line of crimson bodies working back and forth; to wonder with alarm why he was sitting there motionless when every one else was at work, and then to suddenly discover that he, too, was going forward and back on the slide, and in time with the other toilers. In one such moment he looked aside and saw a line of blue figures moving like automatons almost even with them. He wondered if they knew--those automatons--that they were going to win. He could tell them, but he wouldn’t; not a word. A funny little figure apparently sliding up and down at the stern reminded him of a ridiculous image of a heathen god he had once seen in a museum. It was very funny. He tried to grin---- “_Eyes in the boat, Four!_” shrieked the coxswain shrilly, angrily. Trevor wondered who he was talking to. Strange that he should talk when they were losing the race; silence--silence like his own--would have been more fitting. There was a sudden jerk at his arms that for the instant brought him back to reality. He didn’t know what had happened; possibly he had struck a snag; but he found the time again after a fashion and worked on doggedly, as a machine might work, with neither sensation nor spirit. He had caught a crab, but he didn’t know it then. Suddenly an almost overmastering hatred of the tossing blue line across the little breadth of water surged over him. They would win, the beasts, the monsters! And the little heathen image that slid up and down at the end would be happy! And Dick and Keene and all the others would be miserable and heartbroken! Heaven, how he hated those monsters in blue and the little red-haired heathen image!