sang the Sea Rangers in chorus, at the same time joining hands and dancing in a circle about the bewildered sailor-man.
"Waal, I will be blowed!" he gasped for the second time. "They're as crazy as flounders, every last one of 'em. An' I've got' em on my hands for two hull weeks."
"We're ready for duty, sir," announced Will at the conclusion of the song and dance, with another scrape and a pull at his forelock. "You'll find us brave and able seamen, and if you'll only issue your orders we'll gladly obey them."
"Oh, ye will, will ye? Waal, then you can break out the chain-cable and polish it till it shines, clean the barnacles off'n the ship's bottom, keep a lookout aloft for the Flying Dutchman, and another over the bows for mermaids, practise all hands at boxing the compass backwards, get eight bells from the sun, and keep out of my sight till we're away for fear I'll murder some of ye."
"Ay, ay, most gallant skipper," answered Will, with a grin; and then, hitching their trousers as they went, the whole boisterous crowd tumbled down below to examine the interior of the strange home they expected to occupy for the next two weeks.
As soon as they had disappeared, Captain Crotty and Jabez his son, commonly called "young Jabe," a lad of seventeen, who represented the sloop's crew, cast off the mooring-lines, and got their clumsy craft under way.
The Rangers were delighted with the accommodations prepared for them in the hold, which was fitted up with temporary bunks for their use. Each boy made a rush for the bunk that seemed to him most desirable, and scrambled into it to test its comfort as well as to make good his claim by possession.
"But I thought sailors always slept in hammocks," remarked Mif Bowers, in a disappointed tone.
"Oh, pshaw!" replied Abe Cruger. "They're no good, for I tried it at home and nearly broke my neck tumbling out the minute I got to sleep. I expect hammock is only a sailor's name for bed, for no one could really sleep in one; and then, you know, they always call things different at sea. But I say, Will, isn't old Crotty a daisy? And didn't he seem surprised to find us looking so much like regular sailors! What did he mean, though, by the things he told us to do?"
"I don't exactly understand myself," replied the Ranger Captain. "I suppose, though, we've got to try and do them, because it'll be mutiny if we don't."