“He’s a rum chap, that little beggar,” he observed to Mr Fosset, who had been forward to set the look-out men on the forecastle and had returned to the bridge. “I think if you told him he was the laziest loafer that ever ate lobscouse, he couldn’t help saying ‘Quite so!’”
“You’re about right, sir. I think, though, he can’t help it; he’s got so used to the phrase,” replied the other, joining in the skipper’s laugh. “But, hullo, here comes old Stokes, panting and puffing along the gangway. I hope nothing’s wrong in the engine-room.”
“I hope not,” said the skipper. “We want to go all we can just now, to overhaul that ship Haldane saw.”
“If he saw it,” muttered the first officer, under his breath and glowering at me. “A pack of sheer nonsense, I call it, this going out of our course on a wild-goose chase and tearing away full speed on a wild night like this, in a howling sea, with a gale, too, astern; and all because an ass of a youngster fancies he saw the Flying Dutchman!”
I daresay the captain heard him, but the appearance just then of Mr Stokes, our chief engineer, who had now reached the bridge, panting and puffing at every step, as Mr Fosset had said, he being corpulent of habit and short-winded, stopped any further controversy on the point as to whether I had seen, or had not seen, the mysterious ship.
“Cap’en, Cap’en Applegarth!” cried out the chief engineer asthmatically as soon as he got within hail, speaking in a tearful voice and almost crying in his excitement. “Are you there, sir?”
“Aye, here I am, Mr Stokes, as large as life, though not quite so big a man as you,” answered the skipper jocularly.
“I am here on the bridge, quite at your service.”
Mr Stokes, however, was in no jocular mood.
“Cap’en Applegarth,” said he solemnly, “did you really mean to ring us on full speed ahead?”