"Who said so?"
"Skipper: three Russian Destroyers, an' we're to invite them to dinner, an' there's nothing to eat." The Junior Watch-keeper managed the affairs of the Mess for that quarter.
"Those chaps feed like fighting-cocks," observed the Assistant Paymaster. "Let's send for the Messman."
The Junior Watch-keeper applied himself to his cocktail in silence, and the Celestial bandit who, in consideration of a monthly levy of thirty dollars per head, starved or poisoned them according to his whim, appeared in the doorway. The Mess broached the subject with quailing hearts; it was proposed to dine the representatives of a foreign Power. Could he for once rise to the occasion and produce a suitable repast?
The Oriental summed up the situation with impassive brevity—
"No can do."
"Oh, rot!" said the Junior Watch-keeper, who up to this juncture had been gracefully pursuing the olive at the bottom of his glass with the tip of his tongue. "Pull your socks up, Ah Chee, an' think of something."
The Messman brooded darkly. "S'pose you go shore-side, catchee salmon, catchee snipe, pl'aps can do."
"By Jove, yes," said the A.P., rising and walking to the scuttle. "We never thought of that. But it's a God-forsaken place—look at it."
The ship was anchored in a little bay off the mouth of a shallow river. On one side the ground rose abruptly to a bleak promontory, and on the other stretched a waste of sand-dunes. Inland not a tree or vestige of human habitation broke the dreary expanse of plain, which was covered with stunted bushes and rolled away to a range of low hills in the distance.