“Of the safety-valve, Will?”
“No, uncle; but I want to get on,” cried the lad excitedly. “I’m tired of being a burden to you, uncle, and—”
“Hasn’t that boy changed his things yet?”
“Right, Ruth, my dear,” cried the old purser loudly, assuming his old sea lingo. “Here, you, sir, how much longer are you going to stand jawing there. Heave ahead and get into a fresh rig with you.”
Here he winked and frowned tremendously at Will, giving one of his hands a tremendous squeeze, and the lad ran upstairs.
The lugger was not to put out again till evening, when the soft breeze would be blowing, and the last rays of the sun be ready to glorify sea, sky, and the sails and cordage of the fishing-boats as they stole softly out to the fishing-ground for the night, so that as Mrs Marion had gone up to lie down after dinner, according to custom, and the old purser was in the little summer-house having his after-dinner pipe, as he called it, one which he invariably enjoyed without lighting the tobacco and with a handkerchief over his head, Will was at liberty to go out unquestioned. Accordingly he hurried down to the harbour, where the tide was out, the gulls were squealing and wailing, and apparently playing a miniature game of King of the Castle upon a little bit of black rock which appeared above the sea a couple of hundred yards out.
In the harbour the water was so low that the Pretty Ruth, Abram Marion’s lugger—named, for some reason that no one could see, after the old man’s wife—was lying over nearly on her beam-ends, so that, as Josh Helston, who was on board, went to and fro along the deck with a swab in his hands it was impossible to help thinking that if nature had made his legs like his arms, one very much shorter than the other, he would have found locomotion far easier.
As it was, he had to walk with one knee very much, bent, so greatly was the deck inclined; but it did not trouble him, his feet being bare and his toes spreading out widely and sticking to the clean narrow planks as if they were, like the cuttle-fish, provided with suckers.
Josh was swabbing away at the clinging fish-scales and singing in a sweet musical voice an old west-country ditty in which a lady was upbraiding someone for trying “to persuade a maiden to forsake the jacket blue,” of course the blue jacket containing some smart young sailor.
“Hi, Josh!”