The boat stopped for a moment and then pulled a little nearer, and the officer in it stood up and shouted in a clear voice:
“What ship is that?”
“The worst we’ve seen for ten years,” bawled Stacy, pretending that he understood the hail to be about the voyage.
“You are a fool,” called the officer, examining the ship carefully as the boat rapidly pulled nearer and nearer, but still puzzled by her. “I asked the name of your ship.”
“Much obliged for your information,” Stacy answered, “particularly as it’s the hardest thing in the world generally for a respectable merchant vessel to get a civil word out of you cocky man-of-war’s people.”
By this time the boat was directly under the Ranger’s quarter, and there could be no pretense of not understanding the officer’s final hail.
“I ask you, for the third time, what ship is that?”
“And I answer, for the third time, she is the Lord Chatham, bound for Leith from Dublin, short of——”
“Water,” suggested Paul Jones. “That’s the only thing we are not short of.”
“Short of water,” continued Stacy; and then, prompted again by Paul Jones, he cried: