Terence looked inquiringly at his humble friend, as the pyjama-clad man waddled away.
"He'll be one o' those fools as oratates on t' parade on Sundays afternoons," explained the fisherman.
"I knows him well. Always was trying to make us believe that those Huns were our best friends, and that there weren't no use for a British Navy. Th' knows t' sort. For one reason, sith'a, I'm not sorry that those Germans came to Scarbro'."
CHAPTER XIV.
THE END OF THE "TERRIER"
H.M. torpedo-gunboat "Terrier" lay at anchor just within the limits of one of the numerous shallow estuaries of the Essex Coast. By the aid of the lead-line and an Admiralty chart on too small a scale to be of much assistance, Captain Holloway had taken his craft through the intricate approach channel with often less than three feet of water under her keel. Now she was lying head to wind, for it was high water and no tide running, in six fathoms, and within two hundred and eighty yards of the mud-fringed shore.
The "Terrier" had spent an uneventful week on her station, patrolling her appointed limits in the North Sea without a single incident to break the monotony. Swept fore and aft by huge seas that her high fo'c'sle failed to ward off; plugging away in a zig-zag course day after day, till her grey funnels were bleached white with salt spray; with her guns' crews standing by their guns through watch and watch day and night, she was "doing her little bit" as one small unit of the vast, tireless navy.
A few hours previous to the torpedo gunboat's anchoring in the creek, one of the crew had with great suddenness developed appendicitis. Although the "Terrier" carried a surgeon, the case was one for a shore hospital, and as one of the Admiralty "sick-quarters" was situated in the village at the head of the creek, Captain Holloway decided to land the patient with the utmost despatch.
It was blowing fairly fresh. Outside the bar the sea was foam-flecked. Rollers came tumbling in, breaking heavily on shore or else expending themselves harmlessly in the creek. At her anchorage the torpedo-gunboat was pitching slightly to the heave of the open sea.