From the moment that the lookout, lashed to the windlass drum up forward, had spied the little craft away to leeward and had bellowed his report of it through hollowed hands between the thunder of the waves, Joe Byng had had premonitory symptoms of uneasiness.  He had felt in his bones that the navy was about to be nose-led into shame.

At the wheel, both eyes on the compass, as the sea law bids, but both ears on the more-even-than-usual-alert, Curley Crothers felt the same sensations but expressed them otherwise.

“Admiral’s orders!” he muttered.  “Maybe the admiral was drunk?”

The brass gongs clanged down in the bowels of H.M.S.  Puncher and she gradually lost what little weigh she had, rolling her bridge ends under in the heave and hollow of a beam-on monsoon sea.

“How much does he say he wants?” asked her commander.

Joe Byng in the chains and Curley Crothers at the wheel both recognized the quarter tone instantly, and diagnosed it with deadly accuracy; every vibration of his voice and every fiber of his being expressed exasperation, though a landsman might have noticed no more than contempt for what he had seen fit to log as “half a gale.”

“He says he’ll take us in for fifty pounds, sir.”

“Oh!  Tell him to make it shillings, or else to get out of my course!”

It is not much in the way of Persian Gulf Arabic that a man picks up from textbooks but at garnering the business end of beach-born dialects—­the end that gets results at least expense of time or energy—­the Navy goes even the Army half a dozen better.  The sublieutenant’s argument, bawled from the bridge rail to the reeling little boat below, was a marvel in its own sweet way; it combined abuse and scorn with a cataclysmic blast of threat in six explosive sentences.

“He says he’ll take us in for ten pounds, sir,” he reported, without the vestige of a smile.

“Oh!  Ask Mr. Hartley to step up on the bridge, will you?”

Two minutes later, during which the nasal howls from the boat were utterly ignored, the acting chief engineer hauled himself along the rail hand over hand to windward, ducking below the canvas guard as a more than usually big comber split against the Puncher’s side and hove itself to heaven.

“It beats me how any man can keep a coat on him this weather,” he remarked, and the sublieutenant noticed that the streams that ran down both his temples were not sea water.  “Send for me?”

His temper, judging by his voice, would seem to be a lot worse than could be due to the pitching of the ship.

“Yes.  There’s a pilot overside, and our orders are to take a pilot aboard when running in, if available.  There are three men bailing that boat below there, and the sea’s gaining on them.  They’ll need rescuing within two hours.  Then we’d have a pilot aboard and would have saved the government ten pounds.  Point is, can you manage in the engine-room for two or three hours longer?  Three more waves like that last one and the man’s ours anyway!”