“Ah,” rejoined the lieutenant, holding out a hand to guide him, “you’d get used to it in time.”
“Just as the eels do to skinning!” growled the Captain, rubbing his sore shins. “I’d rather be excused the practice, though, on my part.”
Bob sniggered at this; and, passing along a narrow dark passage, its obscurity rather increased than diminished by the solitary illuminating power of a single “dip” in a ship’s lantern hung up against the side, the lieutenant stopped the Captain from any further grumbling by introducing him into the ward-room, which, being well lit up with little electric lamps, offered a marked contrast to the other parts of the vessel they had traversed.
To the Captain, indeed, it was like passing from purgatory to fairyland, as he said; the more so from the fact of his seeing a well-spread table before him, and there being a savoury smell permeating the atmosphere.
So, he took his seat with alacrity, prepared to do ample justice to whatever viands were brought forward.
Bob, who came in a little later, his curiosity being attracted by the sight of the open torpedo-room adjacent, with its stores of Whitehead tubes, gave the witty young surgeon, who was facing the door, an opportunity of cracking a joke at the expense of his smutty face, which he had been unable to wash since his tumble amongst the coals.
“Hullo, Pompey!” cried out this worthy, who by the way had been previously chaffed by his brother officers, such is the levity of sailors in imminent peril, about the gun accident not having provided him with any patients. “Hullo, Pompey, you’ve forgotten your banjo and bones!”
Bob did not see the point of the joke at first, although there was a general titter round the lower part of the table where the young surgeon was seated; when Master Bob did, however, he blushed pretty red, looking uncommonly sheepish.
But the lieutenant came to his rescue.
“He has left his bones behind advisedly, Phillips,” said he to the young surgeon, who was smiling still at his own witticism, “because he knew, if he brought them, you would only carve and saw them about as you served those fossils at the hospital.”