“Oh yes, I will, uncle; but not yet.”
“Very well; be off.”
Rodd hurried out of the cabin, and five minutes later came back rattling and crackling, to present himself before his uncle, who thrust up his spectacles upon his forehead and stared.
“There,” cried Rodd; “don’t think I shall get wet. I wish I’d had it the other night. It’s splendid, uncle, and so stiff that if I like to stoop down a little and spread my arms, I can almost rest in it. I say, don’t I look like a dried haddock?”
“Humph! Well, yes, you do look about the same colour,” grumbled the doctor, for the boy was buttoned up in a glistening oilskin coat of a buff yellow tint; the turned-up collar just revealed the tips of his ears, and he was crowned by a sou’-wester securely tied beneath his chin.
“I say, this will do, won’t it?”
“Yes, you look a beauty!” grunted the doctor; “but there, be off; I want to write a letter or two.”
Rodd went crackling up the cabin stairs, clump, clump, clump, for he was wearing a heavy pair of fisherman’s boots that had been made waterproof by many applications of oil—a pair specially prepared for fishing purposes and future wading amongst the wonders of coral reef and strand.
The deck was almost deserted, the only two personages of the schooner’s crew being the captain and Joe Cross, both costumed so as to match exactly with the boy, who now joined them, to begin streaming with water to the same extent as they.
They both looked at him in turn, Cross grinning and just showing a glint of his white teeth where the collar of his oilskin joined, while his companion scowled, or seemed to, and emitted a low grumbling sound that might have meant welcome or the finding of fault, which of the two Rodd did not grasp, for the skipper turned his back and rolled slowly away as if he were bobbing like a vessel through the flood which covered the deck and was streaming away from the scuppers.