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Updated: May 17, 2025
You might go down and bear a hand yourself, as I won't leave the bridge." "Certainly, sir; I'll go at once with Mr Stokes and take some of the starboard watch with me. It's close on seven bells and they'd soon have to turn out, anyway, to relieve the men now on deck." "That'll do very well, Fosset," said the skipper, and, raising his voice, he shouted over the rail forwards
"All, indeed!" exclaimed the old chief in a despairing tone as he staggered to his feet, enabling Mr Fosset and myself to rise up too an impossibility before, as he was right on top of us, and had served us out worse than the water had done. "Quite enough damage for me, and all of us, I think!"
"I'm sure I hope so, sir," replied Mr Fosset, not committing himself to any definite expression of opinion in the matter. "It has given us a rare good doing all round while it was about it, at an rate!" "Aye, it has that," said the skipper.
Mr Fosset and I were supporting him in our arms against the side of the boat, whence we had just removed him. The poor fellow's strength returned to him almost as soon as he had sipped a drop or two of the brandy, and, starting away from the first mate and myself, as if no longer needing our aid, he stood erect on the deck.
The skipper laughed as he went down again to get the rockets and blue lights which were kept in a spare cabin aft for safety. "He's a rum chap, that little beggar," he observed to Mr Fosset, who had been forward to set the look-out men on the forecastle and had returned to the bridge. "I think if you told him he was the laziest loafer that ever ate lobscouse, he couldn't help saying `Quite so!"
"I'm responsible for that, Mr Fosset," answered the skipper as, moving the handle of the gong on the bridge communicating with the engine-room, he directed those in charge below to put on full speed ahead. "I never yet abandoned a ship in distress, and I'm not going to do so now. We're on the right course to overhaul her, now, I think, eh, Haldane?" "Yes, sir," I replied.
The maid of inferior degree, Fosset, speedily appeared; a pale-complexioned, meek-looking young woman, who set about unpacking Clarissa's trunks with great skill and quickness, and arranged their contents in the capacious maple wardrobe, while their owner washed her face and hands and brushed the dust of her brief journey out of her dark brown hair.
"Yes, of course, there they are, exemplifying the attraction of gravitation or some other long-winded theory of your scientific gentlemen," replied the skipper, who seemed to have got science on the brain this morning, being violently antagonistic to it, somehow or other. "Ah, Fosset, see, our anchor's come home without weighing.
"That's all right, then, Greazer," I said, not being too hard on him, and excusing the sly wink he gave to Prout as he told his barefaced banger about not hearing the bell, in memory of his past services. "Come along now and rig them up smart, or you'll have Mr Fosset after you."
"We're almost within hail now of the chase, sir," sang out Mr Fosset from the bridge when the echo of the last deafening cheer had died away; "I'm going to slow down, so that we can sheer up alongside." "That's just what I was waiting for," said the skipper in answer to this. "Now, men, you see that ship ahead of us?"
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