Ten minutes later the cutter's captain swung the boat's stern in shore when he judged that he was reasonably near enough and too far in for sharks. He had his orders to put the pilot and his crew ashore, but the means had not been too exactly specified.
“Get out and swim for it, you bally Englishman!” he ordered, using a boat-hook on the nearest one to make his meaning clear.
One by one they jumped for it, the pilot going last. He plainly did not understand the point of view.
“Ah'm English!” he expostulated. “Lissen he-ah, Ah'm English! Damwell English!”
“All right; let's see you swim, English!” jeered the cutter's captain, and the pilot took the water with a splash.
“Ah su-ah am English!” he vowed, as he swam for the shore, and he stood by the sea's edge repeating his assertion with a leathery pair of lungs until the cutter had rowed out of ear-shot.
“English, is he?” said Joe Byng to Curley Crothers in the fo'castle, not twenty minutes later. “I'd show him, if I had him in here for twenty minutes!”
“That fellow's interested me,” said Crothers. “He's got me thinking. I vote we investigate him.”
“How?”
“Ashore, fathead.”