“Gum!” he exclaimed, “the Old Man looks pretty sick. I’ll crane him up in the ash-lift.”
This he did, and took his commanding officer into the main cabin, where the air was bright and baking, and the mosquitoes were biting like dogs. Then, throwing back the lid of the medicine-chest (which stood beside the door into the companion way), he gazed appreciatively at the rows of bottles, unstoppered one or two and sniffed at their contents, and then slammed down the lid again as a thought struck him.
“No,” he said, “I’m blistered if I do! Red Kettle wouldn’t give me physic last time I thought I’d like a dose, an’ now I’ll see how he fancies getting round on nothing. Fair play’s a jool. I’ll just report to the pilot, an’ then turn in.”
The “pilot,” however, when the donkeyman had wearily hauled himself on to the upper bridge and stood by his side, proved to be so dead asleep that no amount of shouting or shaking would wake him. Even the flies did not make him wince.
“Sor, wake or ye’ll be sunstrook, if ye’re not that already. Rouse, sor; I can’t lug ye below, an’ I can’t rig an awnin’. I’m too tired to spake again; but if yez stay here ye’ll fry like a rasher an’ be ate by flies. There’s a whopping skeeter in each of yer eyeholes this minut, an’ a kind of a locust browsing on the end of yer snout. Listen! I’m knockin’ wid a boot-toe on yer ribs. Well, man, now, if ye won’t listen to reason, it’s just leavin’ yez I am to stew in yer own juice.”
The donkeyman clumped heavily back down the ladder, and went with weary steps aft along the bridge-deck towards his own place. But at the break of the deck he paused, spread his grimy, shiny elbows on the rail, and indulged in a thin, small whistle.
“Now here,” he soliloquized, “we have come, as the skipper remarked, up an unbeknown drain, to which man’s improvements have not been introjuced, and there’s callers turning up already. That was the nose of a gaff-taups’l squintin’ between those treetops down-stream a minute ago, or I’m a Dago. D’ye know, Mr. Sullivan, chief of the Port Edes, I’m beginning to think ye’d have got better value if ye’d gone cruisin’ off by an’ large with the other boys in the lifeboats. Thrue, there’s the twenty one-pound notes to dhraw, and a daisy of a spree to have if ye can get anywhere to have ut; but ye’ve worked that wage out already, me son, an’ it rather seems as though there’s more laboriousness to follow.”
He yawned cavernously. “’Tisn’t often I’d say ‘No’ to a bit of a scrimmage, but theatricals are not to my taste just now at all. Too much overtime ruins the sense of humor.”
He yawned again, and blinked his eyes drearily. “You must turn in now, Mr. Sullivan dear, or ye’ll fall down here and be ate alive by the skeeters an’ other wild beasts of the forrust; and if the explorers who are underneath that white gaff-taups’l want to come aboard here and make throuble, so far as you’re concerned they’ll be let.”