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"But if those cruisers are crocks, why does the Admiral let 'em out of Weymouth at all?" I asked. "The tax-payer," said Mr. Moorshed. "An' newspapers," added Mr. Pyecroft. "In Torbay they'll look as they was muckin' about for strategical purposes hanamerin' like blazes in the engine room all the weary day, an' the skipper droppin' questions down the engine-room hatch every two or three minutes.
"He thinks 'e's drinkin' lucky beggar!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "I'm agreeable to be read to. 'Twon't alter my convictions. I may as well tell you beforehand I'm a Plymouth Brother." He composed his face with the air of one in the dentist's chair, and I began at the third page of "M. de C."
"Excuse me, Mr. Simpson," he remarked presently, "but your face seems elusively familiar to me. I seem to know it, yet I cannot place it. Haven't I met you somewhere?" "Perhaps you were a lay delegate to the recent Episcopal Convention in New York?" politely suggested Mr. Pyecroft. "No. I did not even attend any of the sessions."
The lady who had admitted them was the mistress; a Junoesque, superior, languid sort of personage, in a loose dressing-gown of pink silk with long train. To her Matilda made known their desire. "Excuse me, Mr. Pyecroft," she called to the clergyman. "So you and your friend want board and room," the landlady repeated in a drawling tone, yet studying them sharply with heavy-penciled eyes.
Between you an' me an' Frankie, we are the Gnome, now in the Fleet Reserve at Pompey Portsmouth, I should say." "The first sea will carry it all away," said Moorshed, leaning gloomily outboard, "but it will do for the present." "We've a lot of prima facie evidence about us," Mr. Pyecroft went on. "A first-class torpedo boat sits lower in the water than a destroyer.
"Talkin' o' wakes " said Pyecroft suddenly. "We weren't," Hinchcliffe grunted. "There's some wakes would break a snake's back; but this of yours, so to speak, would fair turn a tapeworm giddy. That's all I wish to observe, Hinch. ... Cart at anchor on the port-bow. It's Agg!" Far up the shaded road into secluded Bromlingleigh we saw the carrier's cart at rest before the post-office.
These things I, sweating, bore out to the edge of the wharf and set down in the shadow of a crane. It was a clear, dark summer night, and from time to time I laughed happily to myself. The adventure was preordained on the face of it. Pyecroft alone, spurred or barefoot, would have drawn me very far from the paths of circumspection. His advice to buy a ham and see life clinched it. Presently Mr.
The action and the tone confirmed my many-times tested theory that the bulk of English shoregoing institutions are based on conformable strata of absolutely impervious inaccuracy. I reflected and became aware of a drumming on the back of the front seat that Pyecroft, bowed forward and relaxed, was tapping with his knuckles.
But the question is' he looked at me steadily 'is this what you might call a court-martial or a post-mortem inquiry? 'Strictly a post-mortem, said I. 'That being so, said Pyecroft, 'we can rapidly arrive at facts. Last Thursday the shutters go behind those baskets last Thursday at five bells in the forenoon watch, otherwise ten-thirty A.M., your Mr.
De Peyster!" wailed that lady she couldn't help it, though she tried to keep inarticulate her sense of complete annihilation. "When they publish that letter the damage will have been done. It's a forgery, but nobody will believe her when she says so, and she can't prove it! She'll be ruined!" "Well," Mr. Pyecroft commented casually, "I don't see where that bothers us.
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