“Now, Ed,” said Irv, who lived, when at home, in the house with his uncle, a physician, and therefore knew better than any one else on the boat what to do for a wound, “you take the scissors and shear off Phil’s hair just as close to the scalp as you can, particularly around the wound. Hair is always full of microbes, you know.” With that Irv passed through the hold and was absent for some little time. When he returned, he brought with him a teakettle of hot water which he had waited to boil, a basin, and a little box of salt. “What are those for?” asked Ed, who had by this time reduced Phil to a condition of baldness. “How much water is there above the false bottom now?” queried Phil, whose mind refused to be diverted from his duty as captain. “The water to cleanse the wound, the salt to disinfect it, and I didn’t notice any water above the floor,” said Irv, replying to both questions in a single breath. Ed laughed, but Phil eagerly asked, “You mean that the water doesn’t come over the flooring at all,--that there’s no water above the bilge?” “I didn’t observe any,” said Irv, “but I wasn’t thinking particularly about it. I’ll go and look again.” “No,” said Phil; “I’ll go myself if you’ll get me a lantern, for it’s so nearly dark now that it must be quite dark inside.” When the lantern came, Phil made a hurried inspection with a blanket thrown over his otherwise bare shoulders. Then he thrust his shaven head above the deck and called to the two boys at the pumps:-- “I say, fellows, you can stop one of the pumps now, and keep only one going. One of you go below and get supper. Make it a hearty one, for we haven’t eaten a mouthful in twenty-four hours.” In the day’s excitements not one of them had thought about food, but now that supper was mentioned they all realized that their appetites were voracious. Having given his orders, Phil submitted himself again to the hands of his surgeons. Irv poured some of the hot water into a basin and added a tablespoonful or so of salt. “You see,” he explained, “the trouble with wounds is that germs get into them, so the most important thing of all is to cleanse them thoroughly, and after that to keep them clean. I’m using boiled water”--he was sponging the wound as he talked,--“because boiling kills all the microbes there may be in water.” “But what is the salt for?” asked Ed. “To disinfect the wound. You see there must be lots of microbes in it already, and salt kills them. That’s what we salt meat for when we wish to preserve it. The salt kills microbes, and so the meat keeps sound.” “Then it is the presence of microbes that causes decay in meat?” “Yes, or decay in anything else. If we hadn’t thrown Jim Hughes’s whiskey overboard, I’d wash this wound with that. It would make Phil jump, but it would do the work. You know nothing decays in alcohol. However, the salt will do, I think.”