CHAPTER III.
WORK AND PLAY.
I.
'Nice sort o' craft, isn't she?' growled the first lieutenant, eyeing the grimy collier lying alongside. 'Enough to break the heart of a plaster saint!'
Tickle, the junior watch-keeping lieutenant, nodded in agreement. 'She's broken mine already,' he observed dolefully. 'How on earth we're going to take in six hundred tons from her the Lord alone knows.'
Chase, the first lieutenant, refilled his pipe. 'I'd like to get hold of the blighter who charters these colliers,' he mumbled savagely. 'This one doesn't appear to have a winch that'll lift more than half-a-ton; and as for her hatches—lord! they're only the size of—of that.' He could think of no suitable simile, so held his hands out a couple of feet apart.
'You should just see her whips, No. 1,' put in the watch-keeper. 'They were new in the year one; used by Admiral Noah in the Ark, by the look of 'em. I tried to lift one of the cross beams in No. 1 hold just now. Took me about twenty minutes to get the winch to gee to start with. Then, when I'd gingered it up, and had got the beam in mid-air, the whip parted, and the whole caboodle came down with a crash. It would have gone clean through her bottom if there'd been no coal in the hold.'
'M'yes. I heard the yelling,' observed Chase. 'Any one hurt?'
'No. A silly young ass of an ordinary seaman—chap called Martin, who's just joined—jolly nearly got it in the neck, but not quite, luckily for him. It weighed the best part of half-a-ton, and it missed him by about six inches. He'd have been done in all right if his head had been in the way.'
'Silly blighter!' said the first lieutenant unsympathetically. 'What the dooce did he want to get in the way for?'