The Post-Captain folded the letter carefully and placed it on his desk. The clerk retrieved it, and moved towards the door. The Captain turned, "What are you going to do with that, Collins?"
"I take it that it needs only the usual reply, sir—that this is not approved—with a reference to the regulation bearing on the case."
"Why not approved, Collins?"
The clerk was shocked, and his tone showed it. "Because that decoration is for gallant action in face of the enemy, and this case does not come within its scope. In any case the man will get salvage." [The Captain made an impatient gesture.] "If the Royal Humane Society care to——" he stopped, because the Captain had walked to the window, and, in obvious inattention to the speaker, was staring out across the wide Horse Guards and far beyond the fleecy clouds that drifted across the sky over the great sea of buildings that hemmed him in.
Captain Ranson had gone on a journey—back through forty years of time, and across eighty-one degrees of longitude.
He ran up the gangway, straightened his helmet and dirk-belt, and approached the Commander, who, a tall dark-featured figure, was standing looking down on the boat as she rose and fell alongside to the gentle heave of the Indian Ocean—"Second cutter manned, sir."
The Commander turned and looked the boy over beneath his heavy eyebrows. "When are you going to set up a new port shroud?" he asked.
The Midshipman fingered the seam of his trousers, and looked carefully at the buttons on the Commander's tunic—"I thought, sir, that is, we've got a new shroud all fitted, but I thought—the coxswain said, sir—that the old one would do for to-day as the wind's nothing...."
The barometric indications of the Commander's eyes showed threatening weather. He took the boy's arm in the grasp of a heavy hand and led him to the rail abreast the swinging mastheads of the boat.