Why he was not a Yeoman of Signals I never discovered. Perhaps he had
a lurid past. But conjecture is useless. Promotion now would come too
late to be of any use to him.

* * * * *

"Butter, Monkey, Nuts," he rattled off as a light cruiser two miles
away suddenly wreathed herself in flags. "Zebra, Charlie,
Fanny--Ethel, Donkey, Tommy--Ginger, Percy, Lizzie---- Got that, Bill?"

An Able Seaman, busy with a pencil and a signal pad, signified that he
had.

"'Arf a mo', though," resumed the expert, re-levelling his telescope.
"I ain't quite certain about that first 'oist. Why on earth they can't
'oist the things clear I dunno!" he grumbled bitterly, for some of the
distant flags, as is often the case when the wind is light and
uncertain, had coyly wrapped themselves round the halliards and refused
to be seen.

Someone on the bridge of the distant cruiser might almost have heard
his remark, for as he spoke the halliards began agitatedly to jerk up
and down to allow the bunting to flutter clear.

"Ah!" he murmured. "Now we'll get 'em.... Lord!" in a piercing
undertone as some misguided humorist in the cruiser's stokehold
inconsiderately allowed a puff of black smoke to issue forth from the
foremost funnel, completely to obliterate the strings of flags.

The Leading Signalman, not being a thought reader as well as a
conjurer, put down his telescope with a grunt until the pall cleared
away. "In the first 'oist," he said when the atmosphere had cleared,
"in the first 'oist, 'stead o' Fanny put 'Arry.' 'H' for 'Arry."

The A.B. sucked his pencil and acquiesced, while his friend, darting to
the after side of the small bridge, hoisted the white and red
"Answering Pendant" to show that the signal had been seen and read. He
then handed the pad across, on which, in large sprawling capital
letters, he had laboriously traced "BMN--ZCF--EDT--GPL."

The "Butter, Monkey, Nuts" business, incomprehensible and startling as
it might have been to any outsider, merely emphasised the difference in
sound between various letters. B, C, D, E, P, and T; J and K; M and N,
among others, are very much alike when pronounced by themselves; but
"butter" could not well be mistaken for "Charlie," neither could
"monkey" be confounded with "nuts."

The Leading Signalman looked out the meaning of the different groups of
letters in the book provided for the purpose and showed the result to
his commanding office