“Quite so, Haldane; quite so,” chuckled Spokeshave, as pleased as Punch at the imaginary compliment. “I do believe I could teach Irving a thing or two if I had the mind to!”
“Yes, you donkey, if you had the mind to,” said I witheringly, by giving an emphasis he did not mean to his own words. “‘Very like a whale,’ as our old friend Polonius says in the play, the real Hamlet, I mean, my boy, not your version of it. ‘Very like a whale,’ indeed!”
“I’m sure, Mr Haldane,” he answered loftily, cocking his long nose in the air with a supercilious sniff, “I don’t know what ye mean.”
“And I’ve no time to waste telling you now,” returned I.
At that moment we emerged on the open deck from under the back of the poop, where we had been losing our time and talking nonsense; and, looking towards the bridge forward, I saw Colonel Vereker, the very person about whom we had been speaking, standing by the side of the skipper.
“O, Lor’, Spokeshave, what a crammer!” I cried. “You said not a moment ago that Garry O’Neil was about to cut off the colonel’s leg, while there he is standing there, all right!”
“I didn’t say he had cut it off yet,” he retorted; “I said he was going to cut it off. O’Neil told me so himself.”
“Then,” said I, “instead of cutting off the poor colonel’s leg, he was only ‘pulling your leg,’ my joker!”
The cross-grained little beggar, however, did not seem to quite understand the term I employed thus in joke, though it was used at sea to express the fact of “taking a rise” out of any one, and a common enough saying.
“I’m not the only fellow who tells crammers,” he grimly muttered. “How about that yarn of yours of the blessed ‘ghost-ship’ you saw the other night, I’d like to know. I believe, too, that the colonel, as you call him, is only an impostor and that the skipper is going on just such a wild-goose chase after this ship of his, which he says was captured by pirates, as he did that Friday hunting your Flying Dutchman! wasting our time with your idiotic story. Pirates and niggers, indeed! Why, this chap, I’ll bet, is a nigger himself, and more of a pirate than any one we’ll come across if we steam from here to the North Pole. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Dick Haldane; you and your confounded ‘ghost-ship’ together! Such utter humbug and nonsense, and thinking you take people in with such yarns in these days!”