That very night, then, four small bodies, each naked save for a lifebelt, barrelshaped and extending from breast almost to knee, slipped over the side of the ship with awkward splashes and proceeded to disport themselves in the river.  Scolding tugs sent waves for them to ride; ferries crawled like gigantic bugs with a hundred staring eyes.  They found the Quartermaster on a stringpiece immersed to the neck and smoking his pipe, and surrounded him—­four small, shouting imps, floating barrels with splashing hands and kicking feet.

“Gwan, ye little devils!” said the Quartermaster, clutching the stringpiece and looking about in the gloom for a weapon.  The Red Un, quite safe and audacious in his cork jacket, turned over on his back and kicked.

“Gwan yerself, Methuselah!” he sang.

They stole the old man’s pipe and passed it from mouth to mouth; they engaged him in innocent converse while one of them pinched his bare old toe under water, crab-fashion.  And at last they prepared to shin up the rope again and sleep the sleep of the young, the innocent and the refreshed.

The Chief was leaning over the rail, just above, smoking!

He leaned against the rail and smoked for three hours!  Eight eyes, watching him from below, failed to find anything in his face but contemplation; eight hands puckered like a washerwoman’s; eight feet turned from medium to clean, from clean to bleached—­and still the Chief smoked on.  He watched the scolding tugs and the ferryboats that crawled over the top of the water; he stood in rapt contemplation of the electric signs in Jersey, while the ship’s bells marked the passage of time to eternity, while the Quartermaster slept in his bed, while the odours of the river stank in their nostrils and the pressure of the ship’s lifebelts weighed like lead on their clammy bodies.

At eight bells—­which is midnight—­the Chief emptied his twenty-fourth pipe over the rail and smiled into the gloom beneath.

“Ye’ll better be coming up,” he remarked pleasantly.  “I’m for turning in mysel’.”

He wandered away; none of the watch was near.  The ship was dark, save for her riding lights.  Hand over puckered hand they struggled up and wriggled out of the belts; stark naked they ducked through passageways and alleys, and stowed their damp and cringing forms between sheets.

The Red Un served the Chief’s breakfast the next morning very carefully.  The Chief’s cantaloupe was iced; his kipper covered with a hot plate; the morning paper propped against McAndrew’s hymn.  The Red Un looked very clean and rather bleached.

The Chief was busy; he read the night reports, which did not amount to much, the well soundings, and a letter from a man offering to show him how to increase the efficiency of his engines fifty per cent, and another offering him a rake-off on a new lubricant.

Outwardly the Chief was calm—­even cold.  Inwardly he was rather uncomfortable:  he could feel two blue eyes fixed on his back and remembered the day he had pulled them out of the river, and how fixed and desperate they were then.  But what was it McAndrew said?  “Law, order, duty an’ restraint, obedience, discipline!”