“Get out and swim for it, you bally Englishman!” he ordered, using a boat-hook on the nearest one to make his meaning clear.

One by one they jumped for it, the pilot going last.  He plainly did not understand the point of view.

“Ah’m English!” he expostulated.  “Lissen he-ah, Ah’m English!  Damwell English!”

“All right; let’s see you swim, English!” jeered the cutter’s captain, and the pilot took the water with a splash.

“Ah su-ah am English!” he vowed, as he swam for the shore, and he stood by the sea’s edge repeating his assertion with a leathery pair of lungs until the cutter had rowed out of ear-shot.

“English, is he?” said Joe Byng to Curley Crothers in the fo’castle, not twenty minutes later.  “I’d show him, if I had him in here for twenty minutes!”

“That fellow’s interested me,” said Crothers.  “He’s got me thinking.  I vote we investigate him.”

“How?”

“Ashore, fathead.”

“There’ll be no shore leave.”

“No?  You left off being wet nurse to the dawg?” “I brush him, mornin’s; if that’s what you mean.”

“Is he fit?”

“Fit to fight a bumboat full o’ pilots!”

“Could he be sick for an hour?”

“Might be did.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Morning?”

“At about two bells?”

“It could be done.”

“Then do it!”

“Why?”

“Because, Joe Byng my boy, you and I want shore leave; and the pup—­ and he’s a decent pup—­must suffer for to make a ’tween-deck holiday.  Get my meaning?  I’ve a propagandrum that’ll work this tide.  You go and set the fuse in the pup’s inside; and mind you, time it right, my son—­for two bells when the old man’s in the chair!”

So Joe Byng, who was something of an expert in the way and ways of dogs, departed in search of an oiler with whom he was on terms of condescension; and he returned to the fo’castle a little later with the nastiest, most awful-smelling mess that ever emanated even from the engine-room of a destroyer in the Persian Gulf (where grease and things run rancid.)

II.

Lying lazily at anchor off the reeking beach of Adra Bight, the Puncher looked peaceful and complacent—­which is altogether opposite to what she and her commander were, or had been, for a month.  The ship hummed her shut-in discontent, as a hive does when the bees propose to swarm, and her commander—­who never, be it noted, went to windward of the one word “damn”—­used that one word very frequently.

He sat “abaft the mainmast” at a table that was splotched already with abundant perspiration, and the acting engineer who stood in front of him shifted from foot to foot in attitudes expressive of increasing agony of mind.  It grew obvious at last that there was a limit to Mr. Hartley’s store of courteous deference.