“Quite,” said Portson. “But not bad fun.”
“Not at all, but that’s what makes it all the madder. Well, he didn’t argue any more. He warned me I’d be hauled over the coals for what I’d done, and I warned him to keep two cables ahead of me and not to yaw.”
“Jaw?” said Winchmore, sleepily.
“No. Yaw,” Maddingham snarled. “Not to look as if he even wanted to yaw. I warned him that, if he did, I’d loose off into him, end-on. But I was absolutely polite about it. ’Give you my word, Tegg.”
“I believe you. Oh, I believe you,” Tegg replied.
“Well, so I took him into port—and that was where I first ran across our Master Tegg. He represented the Admiralty on that beach.”
The small blinking man nodded. “The Admiralty had that honour,” he said graciously.
Maddingham turned to the others angrily. “I’d been rather patting myself on the back for what I’d done, you know. Instead of which, they held a court-martial——”
“We called it an Inquiry,” Tegg interjected.
“You weren’t in the dock. They held a court-martial on me to find out how often I’d sworn at the poor injured Neutral, and whether I’d given him hot-water bottles and tucked him up at night. It’s all very fine to laugh, but they treated me like a pickpocket. There were two fat-headed civilian judges and that blackguard Tegg in the conspiracy. A cursed lawyer defended my Neutral and he made fun of me. He dragged in everything the Neutral had told him about my blood-pressures on the Carlsbad trip. And that’s what you get for trying to serve your country in your old age!” Maddingham emptied and refilled his glass.