"I needn't go on the sick-list, sir, need I?"
The Fleet Surgeon smiled in his nasty way, and then fastened a long splint to the leg, and, of course, that made it certain that I could not go back to "No. 3".
How I did wish that I had not gone to sleep in the boat, and then no one would have known that my leg had been hit, and I might still have been aboard her. What a fool I had been! All my chances were gone, and, feeling utterly wretched, I couldn't manage to keep back a tear, and Dr. Fox saw it before I could brush it away.
"Pain you, youngster?" he asked, and then he must have understood, for he laughed and called me a young fire-eater, and wanted to know if I wasn't content with having been wounded twice, which made me get red and uncomfortable, and made me hate him.
It was impossible to walk with the beastly splint, so they carried me aft and put me in the Captain's spare cabin.
Tommy came along, too, and spread his hammock on deck, the sentry outside shut the door, and we slept soundly for nearly ten hours. Wasn't that a sleep? and weren't we hungry, too, when we did wake up?
Tommy went off to the gun-room, and the mess-man sent us in any amount of food. What a time we did have! And all the midshipmen crowded in and talked thirteen to the dozen, and wanted to hear all about our adventures, and to see the scratch in my leg. You can imagine how important I felt, especially when Captain Helston, with his arm still bandaged to his side, came to see me, and said some awfully jolly things. What I wanted, though, and what we both wanted, was to know whether we could go back to "No. 3", and I managed awkwardly, and getting very red in the face, to ask him.
He smiled grimly, and said, "I'll see what I can do when you come off the sick-list," and left us happy again.
It turned out that Mr. Parker himself had fallen asleep in Captain Helston's cabin after he had reported to him, and that, as everybody in both destroyers had been practically forty-eight hours without rest, people had been sent to them from the Laird just to keep up steam and keep a look-out during the day.
This news made Tommy and myself quite contented, for, at any rate, we were not the only ones who couldn't keep awake.