Presently, in came the youngest-looking thing in soldiers anyone ever saw, with a face as pink and white as the China Doll's, and the first buds of a tiny moustache on his upper lip.
"It's perfectly damnable outside," he piped in his girlish voice, as he seized a biscuit and a cup of cocoa.
"Hullo!" sang out the Navigator, as they all heard a knock on a door beneath them; "there's someone banging at the Skipper's door." (The Captain, when at sea, slept in a tiny cabin immediately beneath the chart-house and above the shelter deck.)
They heard the Captain's voice calling "Come in"; and the Navigator, seizing his glasses, and singing out that "the Captain would be up on the bridge in a jiffy—he always does if anyone wakes him," went out, followed by the others.
In a minute the Captain came up, shouting for him.
"Here I am, sir."
He seized the Navigator by the arm excitedly—the Captain was seldom anything but calm—and drew him into the chart-house. "Read this," he said, snapping his jaws together and sticking out his little pointed beard, as the door was closed and the light glared out.
The Navigator read: "Achates is to proceed with dispatch to Malta, calling at Gibraltar for coal if necessary."
"That means the Dardanelles, sir! Finish North Sea, sir?"
Captain Macfarlane looked down at him with twinkling eyes and smiled happily.