“Chips” immediately found that his saw or chisel wanted sharpening, and left off to touch up the teeth of the one with a file, and the edge of the other on a stone well lubricated with oil.
The lieutenant grew more angry, and the carpenter looked at him in the calmest possible way, till in despair, seeing that he was doing no good, but only hindering progress, Lieutenant Lipscombe went aft to his cabin and bathed his eye.
“Lookye here,” said Billy Waters the day after Hilary’s disappearance, “I hope, my lads, I’m as straightforrard a chap as a man can be, and as free from mut’nous idees; but what I want to know is this: why don’t we go ashore and have another sarch for our young orsifer?”
“That’s just what I says,” exclaimed Tom Tully.
“No, you don’t, Thomas,” cried the gunner sharply. “You did nothing but grumble and growl all the blessed time we was ashore, and say as our young orsifer had cut on some games or another. I put it to you, lads; now didn’t he?”
“That’s a true word,” said one of the men, and several others agreed.
“Yes,” growled Tom Tully; “but that was when I weer hot and wanted to stow some wittles below, and my feet was as sore as if they’d been holystoned or scraped with a rusty nail. I’m ready enough now.”
“Then I think we ought to go. I don’t like the idee o’ forsakin’ of him.”
“Pass the word there for the gunner,” cried the corporal of marines. “Captain wants him in his cabin.”
Billy Waters pulled himself together, straightened his pigtail, and hauling up his slack, as he called it—to wit, giving the waistband of his trousers a rub up with one arm in front and a hitch up with one arm behind, he went off aft, and came back at the end of a quarter of an hour to announce that a fresh search was to be made for Mr Leigh, and that they were to go ashore as soon as it was dusk.