bout your boat, pilot, but it couldn't be helped."

"Makes me believe that I'm a nigger!" muttered Curley Crothers, not yet
released from duty on the bridge.

"First time I ever wished I was a Dutchman!" swore Joe Byng, coiling up
his sounding line.

Ten minutes later the cutter's captain swung the boat's stern in shore
when he judged that he was reasonably near enough and too far in for
sharks. He had his orders to put the pilot and his crew ashore, but the
means had not been too exactly specified.

"Get out and swim for it, you bally Englishman!" he ordered, using a
boat-hook on the nearest one to make his meaning clear.

One by one they jumped for it, the pilot going last. He plainly did not
understand the point of view.

"Ah'm English!" he expostulated. "Lissen he-ah, Ah'm English! Damwell
English!"

"All right; let's see you swim, English!" jeered the cutter's captain,
and the pilot took the water with a splash.

"Ah su-ah am English!" he vowed, as he swam for the shore, and he stood
by the sea's edge repeating his assertion with a leathery pair of lungs
until the cutter had rowed out of ear-shot.

"English, is he?" said Joe Byng to Curley Crothers in the fo'castle,
not twenty minutes later. "I'd show him, if I had him in here for twenty
minutes!"

"That fellow's interested me," said Crothers. "He's got me thinking. I
vote we investigate him."

"How?"

"Ashore, fathead."

"There'll be no shore leave."

"No? You left off being wet nurse to the dawg?" "I brush him, mornin's;
if that's what you mean."

"Is he fit?"

"Fit to fight a bumboat full o' pilots!"

"Could he be sick for an hour?"

"Might be did."

"Tomorrow?"

"Morning?"

"At about two bells?"

"It could be done."

"Then do it!"

"Why?"

"Because, Joe Byng my boy, you and I want shore leave; and the pup--and
he's a decent pup--must suffer for to make a 'tween-deck holiday. Get my
meaning? I've a propagandrum that'll work this tide. You go and set the
fuse in the pup's inside; and mind you, time it right, my son--for two
bells when the old man's in the chair!"

So Joe Byng, who was something of an expert in the way and ways of
dogs, departed in search of an oiler with whom he was on terms of
condescension; and he returned to the fo'castle a little later with
the nastiest, most awful-smelling mess that ever emanated even from the
engine-room of a destroyer in the Persian Gulf (where grease and things
run rancid.)