“It’s all right, Mr. Master-at-Arms. There’s one consolation; I don’t have to scrub decks for the next two days, anyway. That’s some relief.”
Sam threw himself down on the steel floor, where he promptly went to sleep.
CHAPTER XV—A BAD BANGED-UP BULLY
“Oh, why didn’t he tell the captain that Kester had knocked him down,” muttered Dan. “I tried to signal Sam, but he would not even look at me, so interested was he in what was going on. They never would have held him had they known the truth.”
The lad went about his duties in a thoughtful mood that afternoon.
Dan, by his close attention to duty, his manly bearing, his enthusiasm, had attracted the attention of his superiors. Their eyes were frequently upon him, which was a distinct gain for Dan, in view of the fact that the battleship’s crew consisted of nearly eight hundred men beside her forty officers.
Dan did not know that he was being observed, nor would it have affected his conduct in the least had he known it. He had made up his mind to be an officer some day. He felt confident that this great thing would come to pass. But the goal seemed a long way off at the moment, when, with paint brush in hand, he painted and painted from morning until night, varying his occupation late in the day by grabbing up his deck swab, and, in bare feet, joining the deck division in scrubbing down decks.
Being a sailor by instinct, the Battleship Boy did not consider any work that he had been ordered to do beneath him.
At sunset, that night, the bugle blew for “colors,” meaning the formalities always observed in lowering the Flag at sunset when the ship was at anchor. This was the first time Dan had had an opportunity to see “colors” since he came aboard, for the ship had been under way constantly.
A few moments before the sunset hour the different divisions marched aft to the quarter-deck, each division in charge of a midshipman or an ensign. Coming to a halt, the divisions faced midships, banked on each side of the quarter-deck.