“Yes, sir, it’s good enough; but Mr Butters here and me, we was half asleep. We ought to have formed ourselves into a company—Winks and Co., or Butters and Co., or Butters and Winks, or Winks and Butters, or Co. and Co.”
“Why not Cocoa and Cocoa?” said Fitz, laughing.
“Anyhow you like, gentlemen, only we ought to have done it. Bought the gunboat cheap, and there was a fortune for us.”
“Never mind that,” said Poole. “You’ll be all right, Chips. Don Ramon will be presenting you with a brass tobacco-box, or something else, if you get her off.”
“Go and ast him to order it at once, so as to have it ready, for we shall have her off to-morrow as soon as them ’hogany lubbers have got the steam up.”
“You don’t mean that?” cried Poole.
“Ask Mr Butters here, and see what he says.”
“Yes,” said the boatswain coolly; “and I thought we should have to lighten her by a couple of hundred tons or so. But it makes a man feel very proud of being an English sailor. These half-breeds here give up at once. Why, if she’d had an English crew aboard, that cable wouldn’t have stopped round the screw, and the lads wouldn’t have sat down to smoke cigarettes and holloa. Why, they might have had her off a score of times.”
“But what about getting her safely into the channel again?” said Poole.
“What about getting old Burgess aboard to con her; she going slow with a couple of fellows at work with the lead in the chains? Why, it’s all as easy as buttering a bit of biscuit.”