The captain took the thing in his hand. It started on a fresh cluck, cluck, and the grimy men on the iron decks below humped their shoulders as though to better receive a blow, and began to shuffle away towards the bows.
“Oh, it may be something dangerous,” said Captain Kettle, and he hove his burden over the side, “or it mayn’t. Looked to me like a toy to frighten flats. There’s only one man with the pluck of a roach amongst you, and here’s half-a-crown for him.”
The donkeyman’s black forefinger knuckled his greasy cap.
“As for the rest, your mothers must have suckled you on pigeons’ milk, and then sent you to a girls’ school to dry-nurse. You pack of beauties! Oh, you cowardly, bobby-hunted gems! If the thing was found, well, found it was, and the donkeyman brought it on deck. What do you want to foul the clean air for with your dingy stinking carcasses before your watch was out? I’ll log every man of you for this; yes, Mr. McFee, and Mr. Second, and Mr. Third, I’ll dirty your tickets for you as well, and if you give me another ounce of bother I’ll take care you none of you ever get another berth so long as the universe holds water to carry shipping. You cowardly hounds! Oh, you trust me!”
The men slunk back into the alley-way again out of shot of the skipper’s tongue, and the engineers, plucking up courage first, led the way below. Some one clattered a shovel on a firebar. Instinct made the trimmers obey the signal, and they went to the bunkers. The firemen followed, and the steam-gauge remounted before it had received any appreciable check. It was all an affairs of five minutes.
Kettle passed a forefinger round the inside of his shirt-collar, and strolled across with Onslow to where the deck-chairs straddled in the shade of the fiddley. “They’re a holy crew, aren’t they?” said the master of the Port Edes.
“I think they’re what we want. We should be rather out of it with a plucky lot who insisted on standing by us at a pinch.”
“Oh, don’t you make any error about that,” replied Kettle. “They’d have been shaky anyway, but this bogus clockwork devil of yours fixes them to a nicety. It’ll be every Jack for himself when the scare comes, and Davy Jones take the steamer, and the others. Oh, they’ll run like a warren of rabbits. The brutes!”
Kettle broke off abruptly, and stared moodily over the Gulf Stream. A flying-fish got out of the blue water and ran across the ripples like a silver rat. A school of porpoises snorted leisurely up from astern, and passed the steamer as though she had been at anchor. And the tangles of the gulf-weed floated past like reefs of tawny coral.
“Do you ever read poetry?” the skipper suddenly asked.