“Aye, but it’ll be precious dark soon! It grows dusk in less than a jiffey after the sun dips in these latitudes at this time o’ year,” said he. “Hullo! I say, though, that reminds me, Haldane—”
“Of what, sir?” I asked as he stopped abruptly at this point. “Anything I can do for you, Mr Fosset?”
“No, my boy, nothing,” he replied reflectively, and looking for the moment to be in as deep a brown study as he accused me of being just now. “Stop, though, I tell you what you can do. Run forwards and see what that lazy lubber of a lamp-trimmer is about. He’s always half an hour or so behind time, and seems to get later every day. Wake him up and make him hoist our masthead lantern and fix the side lights in position, for it’ll soon be dark, I bet ’ee, in spite of all that flare-up aloft over there, and we’re now getting in the track of the homeward-bounders crossing the Banks, and have to keep a sharp look-out and let ’em know where we are, to avoid any chance of collision.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” I cried, making my way along the gangway by the side of the deckhouse towards the fo’c’s’le, which was still lit up by the afterglow as if on fire. “I’ll see to it all right, and get our steam lights rigged up at once, sir.”
So saying, in another minute or so, scrambling over a lot of empty coal sacks and other loose gear that littered the deck, besides getting tripped up by the tackle of the ash hoist, which I did not see in time from the glare of the sky coming right in my eyes, I gained the lee side of the cook’s galley at the forward end of the deckhouse. Here, as I conjectured, I found old Greazer, our lamp-trimmer. This worthy, who was quite a character in his way, was a superannuated fireman belonging to the line, whom age and long years of toil had unfitted for the rougher and more arduous duties of his vocation in the stoke-hold, and who now, instead of trimming coals in the furnaces below, trimmed wicks and attended to the lamps about the ship, on deck and elsewhere. He managed, I may add, to make his face so dirty in the carrying out of the lighter duties to which he was now called, probably in fond recollection of his byegone grimy task in the engine-room, that his somewhat personal cognomen was very appropriate, his countenance being oily and smutty to a degree!
He was a very lazy old chap, however; and, in lieu of attending to his work, was generally to be found confabulating with our mulatto cook, Accra Prout, as I discovered him now, more bent on worming out an extra lot of grog from the chef of the galley in exchange for a lump of “hard” tobacco, than thinking of masthead lanterns or the ship’s side lights, green and red.
“What are you about, lamp-trimmer?” I called out sharply on catching sight of him palavering there with the mulatto, the artful beggar furtively slipping the tin pannikin out of which he had been drinking into the bosom of his jumper. “Here’s two bells struck and no lights up!”
“Two bells, sir?”
“Aye, two bells,” I repeated, taking no notice of his affected air of surprise. “There’s the ship’s bell right over your head where you stand, and you must have heard it strike not five minutes ago.”
“Lor’, Master Dick, may I die a foul death ashore if I ever heard a stroke,” he replied as innocently as you please. “Howsomdever, the lamps is all right, sir. I ain’t ’ave forgot ’em.”