"Go below."
"And just sposin I won't," answered the drunkard--"only sposin,
mind!--just for the sake of argyment, d'ye see?--what then?"
"Irons."
The drunkard folded his arms.
"And might I make so bold, Commander Ardin," he began elaborately,
"to ask who'll fight your guns, your Actin Fust in irons; and besides
yourself ne'er another officer on the quar'er-deck--only this ere squab."
"I'll fight em myself if needs be. Go below, d'ye hear?"
The Gunner stumbled away, roaring laughter.
"Sail the blurry ship; fight the blurry ship; sink the blurry ship; and go
to ell in the blurry ship. That's old Ding-dong."
CHAPTER IV
OLD DING-DONG
"They call you Kit?"
The boy started.
His name, his pet name that he had not heard for days, on the lips of
this block-of-granite little man, who had only spoken so far to snub
him.
"Mother does, sir--and Gwen."
There was silence; only the water talking beneath the ship's bows, as
she took the open sea and began to swing to it.
"Your father was my friend," continued the voice, less harsh now. "I
was a pit-boy; he was a gentleman: we was friends."
The voice was gruff again.
"Ran away to sea same night--he from the Hall; me from the pit-mouth.
Met under the old oak on the green.
"'Ready, Bill?' says he.
"'Right, sir,' says I.
"'Then forge ahead.'
"And forge ahead it was, and never parted, till the Lord saw good to
come atween us for the time bein at St. Vincent."
The voice in the darkness ceased and began again.
"Quiberon Bay was our first. Fifty-nine that were. I was
powder-monkey on the _Royal George_; he was Hawke's orderly
midshipman. St. Vincent our last. And a God's plenty in between. One
time Dutchmen; one time Dons; and most all the time the French. Yes,
sir," with quiet gusto, "reck'n we saw all the best that was goin in our
time, and not a bad time neether--for them as like it, that's to say:
seamen and such."
He was silent for a time, chewing his memories.
And what memories they were!--Had he not sailed under Boscawen in
the fifties, when that old sea-dog stood between England and Invasion?
Had he not lived to see Napoleon's Eagles brooding over the cliffs of
France, intent on the same enterprise?--And between the two, what men,
what deeds?--Hawke smashing Conflans in a hurricane; Rodney,
gloriously alone, fighting his ship against a fleet; Duncan hammering
the Dutch; Sam Hood, Jack Jervis, Nelson, Cuddie Collingwood; and
all that grim array of big-beaked, bloody-fisted fighting men who for
fifty years had held the narrow seas against all comers.
"D'you remember your father?"
The old man brooded over the boy. In a dumb and misty way he was
puzzling out one of life's mysteries--this long stripling with the eyes
sprung somehow from that other long stripling with the eyes, whom he
had followed from the pit-mouth fifty years since.
"I just remember him coming into the nursery with mother and a candle
the night before he sailed the last time, sir, to join Lord Howe."
"Ah," mused the old man, "that'd be a week afoor the First o June; and
nigh three years afoor he died."
He paused again, rummaging in his memory.
"He was Post-Captain at St. Vincent; I was his First--aboord the old
_Terrible_, 74.... You'll ha heard all about that tale. [Footnote: Sir John
Jervis crushed the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent in 1797. In this
action the Spanish fleet was in two divisions. In order to prevent a
junction between them Nelson drew out of the British line and
single-handed attacked the Spanish weather-division, including the
Spanish flag-ship and five other sail of the line. See Mahan's "Life of
Nelson."]
"'Plucky chap, Nelson,' says the Captain, as he tumbles to the little
man's game. 'Wear ship, and a'ter him.' So we hauls out? the line, us
and the _Culloden_--Tom Troubridge--and pushes up, all sail set, to
help him.
"By then we got alongside, the _Captain_--Nelson's ship she were--was
a sheer hulk. As we pass her, your father leans over the rail.
"'Well done, _Captain_,' says he, liftin his hat.
"Nelson blinks his one eye up--I can see him now.
"'That you, Kit?' he pipes through his nose that way of is'n. 'You've got
it all your own way now. I'm a wreck. Good luck, Terrible.'
"So on we goes bang atween two Spanish Fust-rates--hundud and
twenty guns apiece. Had em all to ourselves, and asked no better.
"'Just your style, Bill,' says the Captain. He was pacing up and down
the lee of the poop with me. 'Pretty work, ain't it?'
"'Too pretty to last, sir,' says I; as our fore-mast went by the board.
"Just then up runs the carpenter's mate all of a sweat.
"'Well, Michael,'
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