He was not at all melancholy by nature. He could keep the ward-room mess ringing with darky stories on a quiet night in port. His messmates called him Doc; and when the ship was at sea they were all glad to see him on the bridge studying things out. He had plenty of time for that. In two cruises his only cases were one quartermaster, who got hove across the bridge and broke his nose, and a gunner's mate who broke his leg by being bounced out of his bunk one windy night. They were a disgustingly healthy lot, these destroyer crews. But he felt pleased just to be out to sea. These high hills of moving water sure did give a little ship heaps of action sometimes. He would watch them from the bridge. He would watch the officer of the watch too, and the man at the wheel, and the lookouts with their eyes skinned for U-boats, and the signal quartermasters balanced on the flying bridge and sending their messages in a jumping sea-way. He would go down to the chart house with the navigator and stand by to pass him dividers and parallels. He would stop to sigh when he thought that if somebody had only tipped him off in time he might have gone to Annapolis and right now be a young naval officer dashing around on one of these same destroyers. Still, being a surgeon on one of them wasn't too bad. If they had a battle or anything, a ship's doctor wasn't going to be too far away. It was in his third cruise that the 352 got the S O S which resulted in the rescue of the big steamer spoken of. There had been other S O S's--any number of them--but this time there was something doing for our young doctor. When she signalled that nine of her people had been wounded by shell and shrapnel fire, and the 352's skipper ordered a deck officer and a whale-boat away, he also told Doc to break out his medical gear and go along. Doc already had his surgical gear ready; from the first word of the shelling he had gone below, and now everything was laid out ready for action on the ward-room transom. Over to the ship they went, all hands in life-vests, and while the deck officer of the 352 was cross-questioning the captain and engineer, and looking around to see how much damage had been done and so on, Doc was rigging up an operating-table between the chart house and the chart deck rail, slinging the table in sort of hammock style so that when the ship rolled she would not roll his patients overboard. Doc was no mean little operator. The great danger to most of the wounded men was of infection. One after the other, he had his cases up, asked about four questions, had about four looks, and went to it. No knowing that the U-boat might pop up again and try a few more shells, or that a bulkhead would not give way, or a boiler blow up when they tried to make steam below. No knowing; no.