When Hargreaves laughed his visitor dropped the knife with a clatter, and leapt from the room like a rabbit. The sub.'s mirth overcame him completely.
'Is everythink orl right, sir?' queried the anxious voice of Pincher Martin, who had been just outside the door the whole time.
'Yes,' spluttered the officer; 'there's nothing the m-matter.'
'Beg pardon, sir; only th' cook jumped art o' this 'ere door as if 'e'd see'd a ghost, sir. 'E seems a bit scared like.'
He was, poor man, badly scared, nearly as frightened as the sub. himself had been a few moments before; but he never quite realised how very near death the cravings of his stomach had led him. After all, no ordinary person is in the habit of making a hearty meal off a pungent, onion-flavoured sausage at two o'clock in the morning! All's well that ends well, but cookie escaped sudden death by the skin of his teeth.
Hargreaves never suffered his discipline to relax, and all through the second day of the passage the work of cleaning the ship went on. Even the German skipper, a very fat person, was pressed into service, and, since nothing else could be found for him to do, he volunteered to spend the morning in scrubbing out the wheelhouse.
'I hope onter-see boot com' an' tak' us all back to Germany!' he remarked feelingly in very bad English after half-an-hour's hard work on his hands and knees.
'If one does I'm afraid you won't get there,' retorted the hard-hearted sub-lieutenant with a wicked twinkle in his eye.
'If we sight a German submarine all the prisoners will be thrown overboard in life-belts, so that she'll have to stop to pick you up. Then, while she's doing it, I shall ram her at full speed.'
The German believed him implicitly. The brutal British were capable of anything. 'Ach!' he exclaimed, sitting up on his haunches and wiping the drops of perspiration from a very scared face, 'dey vill nod pick us op. Ve shall be drown!'