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"More trouble!" exclaimed the professor. He opened the slide covering the bull's-eye windows and looked out. All about was swirling muddy water. "Can you see anything?" the inventor called to Jack, who was in the conning tower. "We've run into a mud-bank, and are stuck fast," called back the boy. "Reverse the engine!" called the professor. "Maybe we can back the ship out."
They smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more.
He had been flashing the light of his bull's-eye lamp over his surroundings, and he now turned it on a coil of rope which hung from a nail in the boarded wall of the shed, between the door and the window. "There you are, gentlemen!" he said, lifting the lamp in one hand and pointing triumphantly to a definite point of the coiled cord with the index finger of the other. "There!
Damon interrupted him. "Bless my rubber boots, Tom! Look!" cried the eccentric man. "We're going to ram a mud bank!" As he spoke they all became aware of a solid black mass looming in front of the bull's-eye window. An instant later the submarine came to a jarring stop, as if she had struck some soft, yielding substance.
"Lor!" gasped Janie, staring before her at the autumn tints that were powdering the dingy elms with gold-dust. There was mingled pride and perplexity in her tones; slowly she savoured the romantic moment to the full, turning it over in her mind as the bull's-eye revolved in her cheek, before finally putting it from her. Then: "I couldn't marry you," she said gently. "You ain't got no prospecks."
Among them were officers and men indiscriminately placed, nor were the casual visitors in the fort excluded from the competition. As might have been expected of men whose amusements and comfortable subsistence equally depended on skill in the use of their weapons, it was soon found that they were all sufficiently expert to hit the bull's-eye, or the white spot in the centre of the target.
There was nothing to be said to men who purred like cats, while sign-language in the light of the bull's-eye was rather difficult. Tom Spink groaned protest when I told Louis to take them below and give them blankets. I made the sleep-sign to them, and they nodded gratefully, hesitated, then pointed to their mouths and rubbed their stomachs. "Drowned men do not eat," I laughed to Tom Spink.
A certain Sunday afternoon in early autumn found them sitting side by side on a seat in a grubby London square. Janie, gripping the handle of cook's borrowed umbrella, which she held perpendicularly before her, the toes of her large boots turned a little inwards, was sucking a peppermint bull's-eye. To Nosey the hour and the place seemed propitious, and he proposed heroic marriage.
If yuh don't, yuh better investigate 'em a lot because I don't know a damn' thing about the breed, and we're liable to need 'em bad." "I believe I may truthfully say that I understand the uses and misuses of injunctions, William. In the East they largely take the place of guns as fighting weapons, and I think I may say without boasting that I can hit the bull's-eye with them as well as most men.
"You've hit the bull's-eye, boy. That's exactly how I do look; and if I went to Cairo and put on a haik and burnoose, and a few rolls of muslin round this fez, speaking Arabic as I do, and a couple of the Soudan dialects, I could go anywhere with a camel unquestioned. While as for you, my dear boy, you couldn't go a mile. You'd be a Christian dog that every man would consider it his duty to kill."
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