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"He's under an opiate" explained Clive in the wardroom. "I had to administer a heavy dose to enable me to try and set the fractured nose."

"I expect it was spread all over his face" said Lomax brutally. "It was big enough."

"The fracture was very extensive and comminuted" agreed Clive.

There were screams the next morning from the captain's cabin, screams of terror as well as of pain, and Clive and his mates emerged eventually sweating and worried. Clive went instantly to report confidentially to Buckland, but everyone in the ship had heard those screams or had been told about them by men who had; the surgeon's mates, questioned eagerly in the gunroom by the other warrant officers, could not maintain the monumental discretion that Clive aimed at in the wardroom. The wretched invalid was undoubtedly insane; he had fallen into a paroxysm of terror when they had attempted to examine the fractured nose, flinging himself about with a madman's strength so that, fearing damage to the other broken bones, they had had to swathe him in canvas as in a strait-jacket, leaving only his left arm out. Laudanum and an extensive bleeding had reduced him to insensibility in the end, but later in the day when Bush saw him he was conscious again, a weeping, pitiful object, shrinking in fear from every face that he saw, persecuted by shadows, sobbing--it was a dreadful thing to see that burly man sobbing like a child--over his troubles, and trying to hide his face from a world which to his tortured mind held no friendship at all and only grim enmity.