'Hercules won, sir,' I told our Skipper, Captain Grattan. 'Won by four to two.'
'Tut, tut, boy! What's that now? Still one game ahead, ain't you?'
'No, sir, we're all square.'
'Well, beat 'em next time, lad.'
A jolly chap our Skipper was—short and plump and untidy, with a merry twinkle spreading over his funny old face, all wrinkled up with the strain of keeping his eyeglass in place. Everybody knew him as 'Old Tin Eye,' and he was so jolly unaffected that nobody could help liking him.
As we leant our hockey sticks up against the railings and sat down in the corner, we could hear him chaffing Captain Roger Hill, the tall, thin, beautifully dressed Skipper of the Hercules, and could jolly well see by the way he fidgeted in his chair that he didn't like it a little bit. Old Tin Eye would call him 'Spats,' and he didn't like it in public, and squirmed lest we inferior mortals should hear of it. I don't suppose he knew that nobody ever did call him anything but 'Spats.' You see, he never went ashore without white canvas spats over his boots, and they were very conspicuous.
Our Fleet Surgeon, Watson—a morose kind of chap—and Molineux, the Fleet Surgeon of the Hercules, stopped talking 'shop' to ask Ginger how many goals he'd scored (Ginger was the terror of his team); and Montague, our Gunnery Lieutenant, and Barton, their gunnery-man, left off talking about the coming gun-layers' 'test' to ask us if the gun-rooms had made up their row.
'No such luck, sir,' we said. 'They're worse, if anything.'
Whilst we were having our tea, one of the Club 'boys' brought along the little Gib. paper, and of course our Skipper had first turn.
'Cheer up, Spats, old boy!' he sang out loudly enough for every one to hear—he loved tormenting Captain Roger Hill; 'there's trouble in Santa Cruz again. Old Canilla, the President, has collared half-a-dozen Englishmen belonging to the Yucan Rubber Company, and won't give 'em up. If you've got any shares in it you'd better sell them.'