Ensign Jack Steel sat on the edge of a life raft whittling a stick. A strange place to whittle, one might say, on the deck of a great U. S. aircraft carrier in mid-Pacific. But Jack loved to whittle. “What do you make when you whittle?” someone once asked him. “Shavings—just shavings—that’s all,” had been his prompt reply. Then, feeling that this was not a real answer, he went on to say, “I whittle and think. Thinking is what really counts.” Jack was thinking now, not thinking hard—just letting thoughts drift in and out of his mind. There was enough to think about, too; they were in Jap waters right now. Something was bound to happen soon, perhaps at dawn. Jack would be away before dawn, for his was a scout plane. Back at the faraway training base at Kingsville he had put in his bid for a dive bomber. “Ah! A dive bomber!” he had said to Stew, his buddy. “There’s the plane for me! You climb to twelve thousand feet, you get near the target, you come zooming down at four hundred an hour, you let go your bomb, and—” “Wham!” Stew had exclaimed. “Yes,” Jack had agreed. “Then you get out of there fast, as if Old Nick himself was after you.” In the Navy you don’t talk back; so when the powers that be read off Jack, or “Jackknife Johnny,” as some of the boys called him, for a scout ship, a scout ship it had been—and still was. And now, Jack thought, I wouldn’t trade my little old scout plane for any ship that flies. To go skimming away before dawn, to watch the “dawn come up like thunder” in those tropical waters, then to skip from cloud to cloud, eyes ever on the sea, looking for the enemy—ah, that was the life! “Nothing like it!” he whispered as he carved off a long shaving and allowed it to drop silently on the deck. A moving shadow loomed up before him. He knew that shadow—“Old Ironsides,” as the boys called him—Lieutenant Commander Donald Stone, boss of the carrier _Black Bee_, Jack’s ship, was on his way to the bridge. “Must get a swell view of our task force from up there, eh, Commander?” Jack spoke before he thought. He’d always been that way. “Eh? What? Oh, it’s you, Jackknife Johnny.” The Commander gave a low laugh. “Well now, on a night like this you don’t see much—a bit of white foam after each ship, and a blink of light now and then—that’s all.” “It’s enough, sir,” said Jack. “You know what’s there—cruisers, destroyers, and maybe a tanker. Your mind must fill in the picture.” “Oh! It does! It really does!” the Commander agreed. “Want to come up and see for yourself?” he invited. “That would be keen, sir!” said Jack, dropping to his feet. “Come on up then,” the Commander urged.