Next morning Watchett hailed the Star and told the latest dreadful news. And at the end he added, in a truly pathetic roar, "Send me them tins o' marmalade aboard, and the butter."
And when Mrs. Ryder superintended the steward's work getting these stores out of the lazaret, she smiled very strangely. She said to her husband: "If he loses another hand or two the Battle-Axe will be no easy ship to work, Will."
"I wouldn't have believed the matter of a hundred pounds would have made you so hard," said Ryder. And Connie Ryder pouted mutinously, and her pout ran off into a wicked and most charming smile.
"I'm not thinking so much of the money as of our ship being beaten," she said.
And poor Watchett was now beginning to think the same of his ship. Like most vessels, the Battle-Axe required a certain number of men to work her easily, and her luck lay in the number allowed being the number necessary. With two hands gone a-missing she would not be much superior to the Star in easiness of handling, and if more went a week of baffling winds now or later, when the north-east trade died out, might give the Star a pull which nothing but an easterly wind from the chops of the Channel to Dover could hope to make up. He began to dance attendance on his crew as if they were patients and he their doctor. And the curious thing was that they all began to feel ill at once, so ill that they could not work in the sun. A certain uneasy terror got hold of them; they dreaded to look over the side, lest in place of an oily sea they should look down on grass and daisies.
"Daisies draws a man, and buttercups draws a man," said old Brooks.
"Don't," said Crampe, with a snigger. "You make me feel that I must pick buttercups or die."
"Do you now?" asked Brooks. "Do you now?"
And he sneaked aft to the skipper, who was turning all ways, as if wondering where windward was.
"I'm very uneasy about Crampe, sir," he said, with a scrape, as he crawled up the port poop ladder. "'Is mind is set on buttercups."