When he woke it was some twenty hours later, for the surgeon had bound up his face and put stitches into a number of lacerations in his body, and had given him cocaine to make him sleep. The sloop was anchoring down by the flour mills, and looking out through his port-hole Mr. Spokesly could see the gardens of the White Tower of Saloniki.
CHAPTER VIII
Mr. Spokesly sat at a little distance from the large table in the Transport Office and listened to the gentleman with four rings of gold lace on his sleeve. It was a lofty and desolate place in the yellow stucco building opposite the dock entrance. The transport officer was a naval captain; with a beard, a brisk decisive manner, and a very foul briar pipe. He was explaining that they needed a third mate for a ship going to Basra and Mr. Spokesly would just do for the job if he would waive his right to a passage home and go to Port Said instead. It was at this point that Mr. Spokesly, rather shaky still from his immersion and extensively decorated with pieces of plaster, took a hand.
"No," he said and kept his gaze on the floor.
"Why not?" demanded the captain, very much astonished.
"No reason's far as I know. But I'm not going third mate of anything, anywhere, any more. That's that."
"Well, of course, we can't force you to go, you know."
"I know you can't."