“Look ye here, messmet, air you agoin’ to make my head shipshape, or air you not?” growled Tom Tully; and then, before his hairdresser could finish tying the last knot, the lieutenant came on deck.
For when Hilary Leigh ran below, it was to seize a long spyglass out of the slings in the cabin bulkhead, and to give his commanding officer a tremendous shake.
“Sail on the larboard bow, Mr Lipscombe, sir. I say, do wake up, sir; I think it is something this time.”
The officer in question, who was a hollow-cheeked man of about forty, very sallow-looking, and far from prepossessing in his features, opened his eye, but he did not attempt to rise from the bunker upon which he was stretched.
“Leigh,” he said, turning his eye round towards the little oval thick glass window nearest to him, “You’re a most painstaking young officer, but you are always mare’s-nesting. What is it now?”
“One of those three-masted luggers, sir—a Frenchman—a chasse marée, laden deeply, and running for Shoreham.”
“Let her run,” said the lieutenant, closing his eye again; the other was permanently closed, having been poked out in boarding a Frenchman some years before, and with the extinction of that optic went the prospect of the lieutenant’s being made a post-captain, and he was put in command of the Kestrel when he grew well.
“But it is something this time, sir, I’m sure.”
“Leigh,” said the lieutenant, yawning, “I was just in a delicious dream, and thoroughly enjoying myself when you come down and bother me about some confounded fishing-boat. There, be off. No: I’ll come this time.”
He yawned, and showed a set of very yellow teeth; and then, as if by an effort, leaped up and preceded the young officer on deck.