“Tha’lt see im!” he suddenly repeated with the utmost ferocity; and catching Demaine sharply by the back of the neck he ran him in to the semi-darkness under the bridge where, as luck would have it, the first officer in a somewhat surly mood was going down off duty.
I should over-weight these pages were I so much as to attempt the language of the first officer when he cast eyes upon the unfortunate figure before him. A stowaway! It was the second time it had happened in three months.
One stammering attempt to make himself heard so dreadfully increased the power of this man’s passion that George perforce was silent. The first officer’s rage rose into a sort of typhoon, and had the law or even the custom of the sea permitted him to do one quarter of that with which he threatened the poor vagabond, a British ship would certainly be no fit place to live in. As a matter of fact when his tirade was over he confined himself to a general curse upon the town of London and its inhabitants, to a particular one directed with menace against the able seaman who had captured the stowaway, and at last, with directions that he should be shown to the captain when the ship was in the fairway and the anxious business of getting her out was over.
For some little time, therefore, Demaine still stood a butt for the occasional but half-exhausted ribaldry of his two guardians, and not until the waterman’s boat had dropped away from alongside and the warping rope had splashed into the slime of the Thames, not until the donkey engine had clanked once more and got it aboard, horrible with all the horrors of that water, and not until the engine was going fairly and the Lily dropping swiftly down the tide, was the captain ready to sit in judgment.
Captain Higgins was a man who had made method and self-control the hinges of success in life. His Caryll’s Ganglia were all right!
Accuracy in accounts, faithfulness to employers, and strict discipline aboard, were, as he was proud of repeating, his motto. And when he heard that yet another stowaway had claimed the hospitality of the Lily, he betrayed no unusual perturbation but sat down at his little desk, and ordered the prisoner to be brought in.
George, somewhat hurriedly introduced by both arms between his now silent captors, perceived sitting at that table a sight very different from that which he had expected. He saw a very small, thin man with a little pointed red beard and the eyes of a weasel, wearing a well-used and somewhat dirty peaked cap, upon the front of which was embroidered a coat of arms long indistinguishable, and surrounded by a scroll of tawdry and threadbare gold braid.
This was the individual upon whom Demaine’s hopes of speedy restoration depended. He was determined not to speak first, though he was certain that the superior education of the officer would pierce through his involuntary disguise.
Captain Higgins pulled out a large, official-looking paper divided into certain mysterious compartments, each headed with a printed rubric, and said briefly, without looking up and with his pen ready to write:
“Name?”