I waited until he had partially quenched his excitement by a long pull at his tumbler, and then asked him again how it happened that his vessel had been boarded by a bailiff.
“I’ll tell you,” he answered. “The wessel was a brig of 300 tons. Coming home she plumped into a schooner. It was the schooner’s fault; we sung out to her to get out of the road; instead of doing which she ported her helm as if to provoke us, and in we went, doing her a deal of damage and carrying away our own jibboom. Well, we arrived in port and discharged, and then filled up again with coal. It was Toosday afternoon, the sky middling dirty, and a fresh breeze of wind blowing. We hauled out and lay at a mooring buoy, waiting for the tide to serve. I was talking to the captain when I took notice of a boat coming along, rowed by a couple o’ watermen, and a chap in a chimbley-pot hat sitting in the starn sheets.
“‘Is that boat for us?’ says the captain, looking.
“‘Why,’ I says, ‘it looks as if she meant to run us down. Is it a wager? Bust me if hever I saw watermen pull like that afore!’
“They were dragging on their oars as if they would spring ’em, lying back until nothing but their noses was to be seen above the gunwale, and making the water fly in clouds over the cove in the starn as if prompt drowning was too good for him, and he was to be smothered slow. They dashed alongside, hooked on, and the fellow in the chimbley-pot hat comes scraping over the rail, shaking himself free o’ the water as he tumbled on to the deck like a Newfoundland dog.
“‘Just in time, captain,’ says he, with an impudent kind o’ smile, rummaging in his side-pocket; and with that he houts with a sort of dockiment, and hands it to the skipper.
“‘What’s this?’ says the skipper, smelling round the paper as it might be, but never offering to touch it.
“‘Only a horder for you to return to the bosom of your family,’ he says, ‘as the date o’ your sailing’s not yet fixed.’
“‘Isn’t it?’ says the captain, breathing short. ‘Who are you, and what d’ye want?’
“‘I’m a bailiff,’ says the man; ‘and I’m here to take charge o’ this wessel, pending the haction that’s been entered against her in the Hadmiralty side o’ the County Court by the schooner as ye was in collision with.’