“It is my business,” said Tom, “and I’ll take care to tell Captain Harding of it.”
“Tell the cap’en and be—” said Mr Tomkins in a rage. “But I’ll save you the trouble, I will tell him myself,” he added a moment afterwards, dashing down into the cabin, and leaving Tom to dismiss his watch and take over the duty without another word.
“That’s pretty behaviour!” said Tom to Charley. “I call that relieving a fellow in proper style. No unnecessary ceremony at all.”
“Well, you brought it on yourself, Tom,” said Charley, with a sympathising grin. “You will badger him so. I suppose, now you are second officer, you intend paying him back for old snubs, eh?”
“I don’t want to notice the beggar at all,” replied the other. “I wouldn’t have spoken to him then if it hadn’t been my duty to do so. He is a pig, though. I daresay he hasn’t told the captain anything at all, as he hasn’t come up.”
“You let him alone for making his story right,” said Charley. “Captain Harding hasn’t come on deck because there’s nothing to call him; for that mysterious craft is hull-down now and almost out of sight ahead.”
Such was the case; and when the captain did turn out at breakfast time he had heard the first mate’s version of the affair, and as the felucca had now quite disappeared below the horizon, altogether pooh-poohed Tom’s account of having recognised Mohammed’s “corsair,” even although Charley backed him up by his statement of what he had heard say in conversation with the stranger.
“Avast there, my dear boys!” said he, speaking good-humouredly to them, as he always did. “That rascally old Turk so stuffed you up with his lying yarns, that you’ve got pirates on the brain.”
Captain Harding, however, did one thing that pleased them, especially Tom, to whom it gave the greatest satisfaction.
Despite the first mate’s protest, he remodelled the two watches into which the crew were divided, putting four of the Greek sailors with an equal number of English Jack tars in each, so that should any “little unpleasantness,” as he laughingly observed, occur, the foreigners would not have it all their own way.