Wooten smiled. 'I feel rather sorry for Tarry-Diddle,' he said. 'But I'm not certain he didn't deserve it, draggin' us out of harbour in the middle of the night all for a ruddy craft which any darned son of a gun could have seen was only a Brixham trawler.' It did not occur to him that he had been badly taken in himself. 'By the way,' he added, 'who were the two retired naval officers?'
'They were invented by the sergeant-major,' MacDonald chuckled. 'One of them was the steward at the yacht club, who goes about in a yachting-cap and a gold badge, and t' other was the man who's in charge of the bathing-machines in the summer. That's what I was told, at any rate.'
'Lord!' said the skipper, laughing, 'it reminds me of that parson, at the other place, who said he had seen the periscope of a submarine at seventeen miles. Seventeen perishin' miles, mark you! He sent a wire to the Admiralty, too, and they called out every destroyer within a hundred miles. But it wasn't Fritz at all, merely the mast of a ship hull down on the horizon. It was rather a clearer day than usual, that's all!'
No. 1 laughed. 'They're all so jolly keen on reporting things, sir; but I must say this sort of thing is the limit.'
'I agree,' said Wooten, chuckling. 'However, we mustn't let Tarry What's-his-name get into trouble. I'll send in a report sayin' we couldn't find any rakish-lookin' craft in the neighbourhood, and that I expect the military people were mistaken. You know,' he added, 'these fellows who've joined the new army are devilish good chaps and devilish keen, and one doesn't want to have 'em strafed unless one can't help it—what?'
'I quite agree, sir.'
'And when we get in I'll write a letter to Bumble-Dyke, asking him not to be too hard on him.'
He was as good as his word, and never regretted it, for less than a year later the name of Temporary Lieutenant Richard Tarry-Diddle, as he was then, appeared in the Honours List. He had won his Victoria Cross at Ypres.