“Why don’t you go an’ lay down,” said the mate, “an’ I’ll send you down a nice cup o’ hot tea. You’ll get histericks, if you go on like that.”
“I’ll knock your ’ead off if you talk to me,” said the skipper.
“Not you,” said the mate cheerfully; “you ain’t big enough. Look at that pore fellow over there.”
The skipper looked in the direction indicated, and, swelling with impotent rage, shook his fist fiercely at a red-faced man with grey whiskers, who was wafting innumerable tender kisses from the bridge of a passing steamer.
“That’s right,” said the mate approvingly; “don’t give ’im no encouragement. Love at first sight ain’t worth having.”
The skipper, suffering severely from suppressed emotion, went below, and the crew, after waiting a little while to make sure that he was not coming up again, made their way quietly to the mate.
“If we can only take him to Battlesea in this rig it’ll be all right,” said the latter. “You chaps stand by me. His slippers and sou’-wester is the only clothes he’s got aboard. Chuck every needle you can lay your hands on overboard, or else he’ll git trying to make a suit out of a piece of old sail or something. If we can only take him to Mr. Pearson like this, it won’t be so bad after all.”
While these arrangements were in hand above, the skipper and the boy were busy over others below. Various startling schemes propounded by the skipper for obtaining possession of his men’s attire were rejected by the youth as unlawful, and, what was worse, impracticable. For a couple of hours they discussed ways and means, but only ended in diatribes against the mean ways of the crew; and the skipper, whose head ached still from his excesses, fell into a state of sullen despair at length, and sat silent.
“By Jove, Tommy, I’ve got it,” he cried suddenly, starting up and hitting the table with his fist. “Where’s your other suit?”
“That ain’t no bigger that this one,” said Tommy.