Shaftoe doesn’t seem to think it’s out of line at all. He’s in such a good mood from the morphine. He tells another yam. This one begins on the coast of Norway (he is deliberately vague about how he got there) and is all about how Shaftoe led Enoch Root and a dozen or so men, including one who had a serious ax wound to the leg (Bischoff raises his eyebrows) all the way across Norway on skis, slaying pursuing Germans right and left, and into Sweden. The story then bogs down for a while because there are no more Germans to kill, and Shaftoe, sensing that Bischoff’s attention is beginning to wander, tries to inject some lurid thrills into the narrative by describing the progress of the gangrene up the leg of the officer who ran afoul of the ax (who, as far as Bischoff can make out, was under suspicion as a possible German spy). Shaftoe keeps encouraging Root to jump in and tell the story of how Root performed several consecutive amputations of the officer’s leg, all the way up to the pelvis. Just as Bischoff is finally starting to actually care about this poor bastard with the gangrenous leg, the story takes another zigzag: they reach a little fishing town on the Gulf of Bothnia. The gangrenous officer is delivered into the hands of the town doctor. Shaftoe and his comrades hole up in the woods and strike up what sounds like an edgy relationship with a Finnish smuggler and his lissome daughter. And now it’s clear that Shaftoe has reached his favorite part of the story, which is this Finnish girl. And indeed, up to this point his story-telling style has been as rude and blunt and functional as the inside of a U-boat. But now he relaxes, begins to smile, and becomes damn near poetic—to the point where a few members of Bischoff’s crew, who speak a little bit of English, start to loiter within earshot. Essentially the story goes totally off the rails at this point, and while it’s entertaining material, it appears to be headed exactly nowhere. Bischoff finally interrupts with "What about the guy with the bad leg?" Shaftoe frowns and bites his lip. "Oh, yeah," he finally says, "he died."