urn in his account of how he had
remembered the salt which he had eaten.

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.M.S. Puncher and she
gradually lost what little weigh she had, rolling her bridge ends under
in the heave and hollow of a beam-on monsoon sea.

"How much does he say he wants?" asked her commander.

Joe Byng in the chains and Curley Crothers at the wheel both recognized
the quarter tone instantly, and diagnosed it with deadly accuracy;
every vibration of his voice and every fiber of his being expressed
exasperation, though a landsman might have noticed no more than contempt
for what he had seen fit to log as "half a gale."

"He says he'll take us in for fifty pounds, sir."

"Oh! Tell him to make it shillings, or else to get out of my course!"

It is not much in the way of Persian Gulf Arabic that a man picks
up from textbooks but at garnering the business end of beach-born
dialects--the end that gets results at least expense of time
or energy--the Navy goes even the Army half a dozen better. The
sublieutenant's argument, bawled from the bridge rail to the reeling
little boat below, was a marvel in its own sweet way; it combined abuse
and scorn with a cataclysmic blast of threat in six explosive sentences.

"He says he'll take us in for ten pounds, sir," he reported, without the
vestige of a smile.

"Oh! Ask Mr. Hartley to step up on the bridge, will you?"

Two minutes later, during which the nasal howls fro