“Ay, ye damned tarrybreeks, ye women i’ petticoats; what th’ jails turns out th’ gun-deck doesn’t mak’ dainty wi’, ye——!”
“Dainty, ho, ho!” another bawled; “chuck, chuck, come wi’ me, dainty——!”
“Yah, ye rascals!” the chandler shouted from his window, “ye rotten mast-greasing rogues—ye captain’s chicken-crammers—wi’ a red-checked shirt at th’ gratings once a month——”
He cursed them, and they taunted him for his stolen tallow and canvas, and bade him stop hammering the King’s arrow out of copper bolts and untwisting the coloured strand that marked his cordage as filched from the King’s dockyards. The rakish woman broke a window with a stone, and cried through the opening, “Ned! Ned!” and the coxswain thrust her back with his hand on her flat breast, and took her a rap over the knuckles. The men handled their stretchers as if they would as lief have broken a head or two as not.
Suddenly the inn door opened, and there was a press forward. A lieutenant appeared in the entrance, his cocked hat athwart like a half-moon and his hooked nose sticking out scarcely less prominently as he turned his profile. Other men could be seen behind him, and the woman darted forward with a cry of “Ned!”
“Turn that slut off!” the lieutenant ordered curtly; and he grumbled to himself: “A pretty lot o’ cattle to pink! I want men with bodies!—We’ll try the Wood, then.... Here, you long rascal: in case you’re deceiving me, do you know what they keep on a ship in a red-baize bag?”
The fellow the woman had addressed as Ned snivelled, and the chandler across the alley cried, “That’s him that robs th’ roosts! Feel in his pocket for handkerchiefs——!”
“You don’t, eh? Well, it makes your back black—black, like dead liver, d’you hear? And some have chosen hanging before a flogging with it. If it isn’t as you say in the Wood, that’s your choice, too, my man!”
The man blubbered in his fear: “It’s so, captain. There’s one fellow swings down a tree on a rope, a right sailor for you—Skipjack they call him—there’s a two-three sheds, wi’ a long pole-wain——”
“Bring those other tinkers out, coxswain; they shall go with us. Which way?—Back, you woman!”