He came up alone.
He clung to one of the hooks of the falls to get his breath. A cap floated up to him. Smiling grimly, he set it on his head. The man on the end of the raft poised himself above him and aimed the long spanner at the cap. Cadogan diverted the blow with his free forearm, and before the other could recover wrenched the spanner from him and dropped it into the sea.
"Oh, ho! that's how it is, is it, Norrie, me lad?" He swung one foot viciously at Cadogan's hand where it was gripped around the hook. Cadogan swooped again with his free hand, caught the man by the swinging ankle, and hauled him off the raft. He released his grip of the man's ankle, only to shift it to his throat. The man seized Cadogan's free wrist with both hands. Cadogan, hanging to the hook with one hand and gripping the man's throat with the other, continued to squeeze the man's throat. The man's legs kicked convulsively. Cadogan continued to squeeze. When the legs stopped kicking, Cadogan forced the head under water and eased up on his grip. Bubbles rose up and burst on the surface. Cadogan placed his ear close to the waterto hear. When he could no longer hear the bubbles he loosed his grip.
With hands to the falls and feet against the ship's side, Cadogan climbed to the deck where he had left his coat. He found it kicked to one side and trampled upon. But the little photograph was still there—in the inside pocket.
He took off his cap, the cap of the drowned man, while he kissed the little photograph. "Coming, coming, oh, coming!" he murmured.
"Have you room for a passenger?" came in a man's voice from the dark.
Cadogan whirled. "Passenger? Passenger! I've fought and schemed and—Oh!"
It was Lavis, and, clinging to his hand, was somebody in a man's long ulster.
"It's the woman—you remember her?—who passed her baby boy into the boat so that he would be saved."
Cadogan said nothing.
"A few minutes ago I found her. She was weeping for her baby. I asked her why she should be weeping now that her baby was safe, and she answered me: 'But who will be there to give him the breast when he wakes?'"
Cadogan rested his left hand, with the fingers clinched around the cap, on the ship's rail.
"If Christ on earth were to be with us oncemore," went on Lavis softly, "would he not say again: 'Greater love hath no man than this'? 'Who will be there to give him the breast when he wakes?'—and she about to die. Have you room for her as a passenger on your raft?"
"It will bear only one."
Lavis waited.
Cadogan unloosed the fingers of the hand on the rail. The cap dropped into the sea.
"She shall be the one," he said presently.
In the rosy flush of a beautiful dawn a lone woman on a tiny raft drifted down to her crying baby and gave him suck.