"Where's the brute now?" he asked grimly.
A scuffling noise in a tin bath suspended from the cork-cemented roof of the cabin betrayed the rodent's temporary hiding-place. Both men looked first at the bath and then at each other.
"It would be as well if we put our helmets on," suggested Wilmshurst, replacing his "double-pith" headgear. "Now, I'll shake the bath and you let rip when he falls. But please don't try to get your own back on me."
As a precautionary measure Dudley beat the side of the bath with the towel. It might have been efficacious if the subaltern had been engaging in apiarian operations, but as far as present events went it was a "frost."
"Tilt it, old man," suggested Laxdale.
Wilmshurst carried out this suggestion only too well. The bath, slipping from its supporting fixtures, clattered noisily to the floor, its edge descending heavily upon Dudley's foot. Again a momentary vision of the leaping rodent, then, crash! With a mighty sweep of the tower-roller Laxdale demolished the electric-light globe into a thousand fragments.
"Getting on," he remarked cheerfully. "There'll be a big bill for 'barrack damages' eh, what? Where's the brute?"
The rat, terrified by the din, had retired to a recess formed by the bulkhead of the cabin and the fixed wash-basin and was acting strictly on the defensive.
"Aha!" exclaimed Laxdale. "Now you're cornered. No use yelling 'Mercy, kamerad.'"
Levelling the roller like a billiard cue the subaltern prepared to make a thrust and administer the coup de grâce, but he had forgotten that he had not yet found his sea-legs. A roll of the ship made him lose his balance, and he pitched head foremost into the rodent's retreat. Like a flash the rat leapt, scampered over Laxdale's helmet, down his back and took refuge in the breast-pocket of Wilmshurst's tunic.