“If you say another word I’ll clap you in irons, you dog!” cried the lieutenant. “A pretty state of affairs, indeed, when men are to answer their officers. Do you hear, there, you mutinous dogs! If another man among you dares to speak I’ll clap him in irons.”
The men exchanged glances, and there was a general hitching up of trousers along the little line in which the men were drawn up.
“Now then, sir. Have the goodness to explain why you have been so long, and why all my signals for recall have been disregarded. Silence, sir! don’t speak till I’ve done,” he continued, as one of the men, who had let a little tobacco juice get too near the swallowing point, gave a sort of snorting cough.
There was dead silence on board, save a slight creaking noise made by the crutch of the big boom as it swung gently and rubbed the mast.
“I call upon you, Mr Leigh, sir, for an explanation,” continued the lieutenant. “Silence, sir! Not yet. I sent you ashore to make a search, expecting that your good sense would lead you to make it brief, and to get back in time to assist in hauling off the cutter which you had run ashore. Instead of doing this, sir, you race off with the men like a pack of schoolboys, sir, larking about among the rocks, and utterly refusing to notice my signals, sir, though they have been flying, sir, for hours; and here have I been obliged to waste his majesty’s powder, sir, and foul his majesty’s guns, sir.”
Here, as the lieutenant’s back was turned, Billy Waters shook his great fist at Jack Brown, the boatswain, going through sundry pantomimic motions to show how he, Billy Waters, would like to punch Jack Brown, the boatswain’s head. To which, waiting until the lieutenant had turned and had his back to him, Jack Brown responded by taking his leg in his two hands just above the knee and shaking it in a very decisive manner at the gunner.
“And what is more, sir,” continued the lieutenant, “you had my gunner with you.”
Billy Waters, who had drawn back his fist level with his armpit in the act of striking an imaginary blow at the boatswain, stopped short as he heard himself mentioned, and the lieutenant continued his trot up and down like an angry wild beast in a narrow cage and went on:
“And, sir, I had to intrust the firing of that gun to a bungling, thick-headed, stupid idiot of a fellow, who don’t know muzzle from vent; and the wonder is that he didn’t blow one of his majesty’s liege subjects into smithereens.”
The lieutenant’s back was now turned to Billy Waters, who as he saw Jack Brown’s jaw drop placed his hands to his sides, and lifting up first one leg and then the other, as if in an agony of spasmodic delight, bent over first to starboard and then to larboard, and laughed silently till the tears ran down his cheeks.