Manifestly Captain Coombs’ feelings were wrought upon almost to extremity. Entering the cabin, his countenance had been an arabesque of distress and despair.
At times of great excitement, so Captain Bent remembered well, Captain York Coombs was overwhelmed by a distressing affliction. He was not merely a stammerer. In stress he was bereft of the power of speech. His breath was dammed back by the convulsive muscles of throat and pharynx.
In the present crisis he was as dumb as a gargoyle and his twisted features rendered him just as grotesquely ugly. He strove to bring his jaws together so that he might have recourse to one remedy for a stammerer; but he merely wagged his head, unable to whistle. With the manner of a drumming cock partridge he flailed his breast with his arms. He pointed to his gaping mouth and with a mighty explosion of breath managed at last to hoot, “Hit me!”
Memory flipped another page in the absolute identification of this man as York Coombs. Often on the Harvest Home Apprentice Bent had seen the chief officer restore speech to the stricken captain at a distressing juncture, when, for example, the crew was making a botch of tacking ship in a gale. By request the first mate would land a hearty punch in the region of the master’s solar plexus, and the shock or the indignity or something connected with the assault always started the captain’s vocal machinery into smooth operation.
Captain Bent was a willing volunteer in this instance. In his alacrity he disliked to think that he was grabbing an opportunity to pay back for larrupings. But Captain Coombs was in a confessedly pitiful plight; he wanted to talk something off his mind, evidently. And he had commanded one who had been used to his commands on the Harvest Home. Captain Bent obeyed with ardor.
He set palm on the table between the two, vaulted across the obstruction and, with plenty of momentum behind his fist, drove a blow against the breast and, for extra measure, landed a stiff punch under the ear of Captain York Coombs, who was knocked off his feet and was launched through a stateroom door, where he lay prone for a moment until a heave of the ship rolled his soggy body under a berth. As Coombs himself would have phrased it, the order was executed A-1, seamanlike and shipshape.
Captain Bent strode to his victim, grabbed the rubber-booted legs, and hauled the former lord and master out into the middle of the cabin, standing over him with doubled fists while Coombs blinked filmed eyes, recovering his senses. He also recovered the power of speech—along with handsome recollection of his entire glossary of sea oaths.
He sandwiched a slab or two of meaty comment between thick slices of profanity.
“Knocking me bedockity-blue galley west. Celebrating my come-uppance, be ye? Go ahead and kick me around the deck to the tune of ‘Blow the Man Down.’ Make it a good celebration while you’re at it.” He grunted to a sitting posture and glared from under the sou’wester scoop.
Captain Bent propped himself with hands on knees, leaned over and returned the savage stare.