Billy Waters finds it out.
“Well,” said Billy Waters, “of all the cowardly, sneaking tricks anybody could do, I don’t know a worse one than staving in a man’s boat. Yah! a fellow who would do such a thing ought to be strung up at the yardarm, that he ought!”
“Every day,” growled Tom Tully. “Well, matey, how is we to get aboard?”
“What’s the good of asking me?” cried Billy Waters, who was regularly out of temper. “Leave that gun alone, will yer?” he roared as there was another flash and a report from the cutter. “It’s enough to aggravate a hangel, that it is,” he continued. “No sooner have I left the cutter, and my guns that clean you might drink grog out of ’em, than the skipper and that Jack Brown gets fooling of ’em about and making ’em foul. They neither of ’em know no more about loading a gun than they do about being archbishops; but they will do it, and they’ll be a-busting of ’em some day. Firing again, just as if we don’t know the first was a recall! Here, who’s got a loaded pistol?”
“Here you are, matey,” said Tom Tully.
“Fire away, then, uppards,” said the gunner; “and let ’em know that we want help.”
The flash from the pistol cut the darkness; there was a sharp report, and the gunner fired his own pistols to make three shots.
“There,” he said, replacing them in his belt. “That’ll make him send another boat, and if that there Jacky Brown’s in it I shall give him a bit of my mind.”
There was a long pause now, during which the weary men sat apart upon the sands, or with their backs propped against the sides of the damaged boat, but at last there came a hail out of the darkness, to which Tom Tully answered with a stentorian “Boat a-hoy-oy!”
“Who told you to hail, Tom Tully?” cried the gunner. “I’m chief orsifer here, so just you wait until you are told.”