“I was with him in the Britannia. I didn’t like him much, but I’m grateful to him now. I must tell him so some day.”
“They seemed to know him hereabouts.”
“He rammed the Caryatid twice with her own steam-pinnace.”
Presently, moved by long strokes, Mr. Pyecroft returned, skimming across the dark. The dinghy swung up behind him, even as his heel spurned it.
“Commander Fasset’s compliments to Mr. L. Carteret-Jones, and the sooner he digs out in pursuance of Admiralty orders as received at Portsmouth, the better pleased Commander Fasset will be. But there’s a lot more——”
“Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe! Come on to the bridge. We can settle it as we go. Well?”
Mr. Pyecroft drew an important breath, and slid off his cap.
“Day an’ night private signals of Red Fleet complete, Sir!” He handed a little paper to Moorshed. “You see, Sir, the trouble was, that Mr. Carteret-Jones bein’, so to say, a little new to his duties, ’ad forgot to give ’is gunner his Admiralty orders in writin’, but, as I told Commander Fasset, Mr. Jones had been repeatin’ ’em to me, nervous-like, most of the way from Portsmouth, so I knew ’em by heart—an’ better. The Commander, recognisin’ in me a man of agility, cautioned me to be a father an’ mother to Mr. Carteret-Jones.”
“Didn’t he know you?” I asked, thinking for the moment that there could be no duplicates of Emanuel Pyecroft in the Navy.
“What’s a torpedo-gunner more or less to a full lootenant commanding six thirty-knot destroyers for the first time? ’E seemed to cherish the ’ope that ’e might use the Gnome for ’is own ’orrible purposes; but what I told him about Mr. Jones’s sad lack o’ nerve comin’ from Pompey, an’ going dead slow on account of the dark, short-circuited that connection. ‘M’rover,’ I says to him, ‘our orders is explicit; Stiletto’s reported broke down somewhere off the Start, an’ we’ve been tryin’ to coil down a new stiff wire hawser all the evenin’, so it looks like towin’ ’er back, don’t it?’ I says. That more than ever jams his turrets, an’ makes him keen to get rid of us. ’E even hinted that Mr. Carteret-Jones passin’ hawsers an’ assistin’ the impotent in a sea-way might come pretty expensive on the tax-payer. I agreed in a disciplined way. I ain’t proud. Gawd knows I ain’t proud! But when I’m really diggin’ out in the fancy line, I sometimes think that me in a copper punt, single-’anded, ’ud beat a cutter-full of De Rougemongs in a row round the fleet.”