Don't think that Bob would peach—not he, intentionally—but I knew exactly what he'd write home—something like this:
'The Angel sends his love—he and I cheeked the Padre at school yesterday—we had awful fun—old Billums (that was I) caned the two of us after evening quarters. This morning we both pretended we couldn't sit down, and groaned when we tried to, till the Padre went for old Billums for laying it on so hard. We've got our leave stopped for trying to catch rats on the booms with a new trap which the Angel has invented. The Commander caught his foot in it. You should have heard him curse.'
That was the kind of thing that used to go home, and his father and mother, and my mother too, to say nothing of Daisy, put it all down to me.
I had to turn the hands 'out' at seven bells, to rig coaling screens, the whips, and all the other gear for coaling, turned over my watch to the fat marine subaltern who relieved me, and got a couple of hours' sleep before the coal lighters bumped alongside.
It was a case of being as nippy as fleas after that, because we had to beat the Hercules. You should have seen the Angel and Cousin Bob in blue overalls, with white cap covers pulled down over their heads, digging out for daylight down in my coal lighter among the foretopmen, all of them as black as niggers, shovelling coal into baskets, passing them up the side, dodging the lumps of coal which fell out of them and the empty baskets thrown back from the ship. There wasn't much of the Angel left about either of them then.
At the end of the first hour we'd got in 215 tons, and as the little numeral pendants 2-0-7 ran up to the Hercules foreyard-arm to show how many tons she had taken in, our chaps cheered. We'd beaten her by eight tons.
'I bet she cheated even then,' I heard Bob tell his chum.
We were still a ton or two to the good after the second hour, and then the 'still' was sounded in both ships, and every one went to breakfast.
You should have been there to have seen us in our coaling rigs—simply a mass of coal dust and looking like a lot of Christy Minstrels—squatting on the deck outside the gun-room, and stuffing down sardines with our dirty hands, every one talking and shouting and as merry as pigs in a sty. Even young Marchant, the new clerk, had got into a coaling rig of sorts and worked like a horse—he was so keen to beat the hated Hercules.
I gave them all a quarter of an hour to stuff themselves, and then down we clambered into the lighters again and began filling baskets—nobody, not even the Angel, shirking a job like this, when there was the chance of getting even with the Hercules.