ready, but _kept_ ready, quite
ready, all the time. Mr. Spokesly, looking still more mulish, said he'd
attend to it.

With the gimcrack little sheet copper binnacle in his hand, Mr. Spokesly
made his way to the chief engineer's room. He felt rather bitter. Here
he'd been going along nicely for two whole days and now this happens!
Spoken to like a dog over a little petty thing like this. As if it was
_his_ fault the blamed thing had got smashed. Did he notice it! As if
the chief officer of a ship had no more to do than moon round the deck,
looking at things....

If Captain Meredith had told Mr. Spokesly that he himself had achieved a
rung in the ladder by the simple process of paying very strict attention
to his boats, it would have been the bare truth, but Mr. Spokesly would
not have seen the point. He found the chief engineer standing before his
desk in some deshabille, filling a black briar. His broad, hairy torso
was almost naked, for the scanty singlet was torn under the arms and
ripped across the bosom. His high-coloured features and reddish
moustache were smeared with black oil, and he was breathing in heaves as
though he had been running. When Mr. Spokesly presented his broken
binnacle the chief glanced at it with a scarcely perceptible flicker of
his bushy eyebrows and continued to fill his pipe from a canister on the
desk.

"Well, Mr. Spokesly," he remarked in a voice suitable for addressing an
immense open-air meeting. "Well, what is it now?" And he struck a match
and lit his pipe.

Mr. Spokesly explained that he wanted it mended.

"Oh, you want it mended. Well, why don't you ship a tinker, my fine
fellow? Eh? Why not indent for a tinker? You've got a carpenter and a
lamp trimmer and a bo'sun and a squad of quartermasters. What's a tinker
more or less?" And sitting back in his swivel chair and blowing great
clouds, he looked maliciously at Mr. Spokesly. The chief was a man with
an atmosphere. He had an immense experience, which he kept to himself
save at the hour of need. He had an admirable staff who did just what he
wanted without any rhetoric. Save at times like the present moment, when
Mr. Spokesly, though he was quite unaware of it, was very much _de trop_
owing to a breakdown in the engine room, the chief was a tolerant and
breezy example of the old school. Just now, with the sweat cooling on
his back and a battered binnacle offered to him for repair, he took
refuge in dry malice. He studied Mr. S