MACHASSAN AH
I.
Waist-held in the chains and soused in the fifty-foot-high spray,
Joe Byng eyed his sounding lead that swung like a pendulum below him,
and named it sacrilege.
"This 'ere navy ain't a navy no more," he muttered. "This 'ere's
a school-gal promenade, 'and-in-'and, an' mind not to get your little
trotters wet, that's what this is, so 'elp me two able seamen an'
a red marine!"
From the moment that the lookout, lashed to the windlass drum up
forward, had spied the little craft away to leeward and had bellowed
his report of it through hollowed hands between the thunder of the
waves, Joe Byng had had premonitory symptoms of uneasiness. He had
felt in his bones that the navy was about to be nose-led into shame.
At the wheel, both eyes on the compass, as the sea law bids, but both
ears on the more-even-than-usual-alert, Curley Crothers felt the same
sensations but expressed them otherwise.
"Admiral's orders!" he muttered. "Maybe the admiral was drunk?"
The brass gongs clanged down in the bowels of H.
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