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Well, not thinking of him or his tea or that it was time for me to go on watch, but awed by the majesty of God's handiwork in the wonderful colouring, of the afterglow, which no mortal artist could have painted, no, none but He who limns the rainbow, I stood there so long by the gangway, gazing at the glorious panorama outspread before me, that I declare I clean forgot Spokeshave's very existence, all-important though he considered himself, and I was only recalled to myself by the voice of Mr Fosset, our first officer, who had approached without my seeing him, speaking close beside me.
"Where on earth are you squinting now, boy?" said he, a bit huffy at not making her out and apparently inclined to Spokeshave's opinion that I had not really seen her at all. "Where away?" "There, sir, away to leeward," cried I, almost jumping over the bridge rail in my excitement. "She's nearly abreast of our mizzen chains and not a mile off. She seems coming up on the port tack, sir!"
His face beamed as he spoke and he looked as if he would have liked to have rubbed his hands together in his old way when he felt particularly jolly, but unfortunately his crippled arm, which was still in a sling, prevented that! "Oh, that's all right, sir," I replied in an equally cheery tone, the old chief's genial address making me forget at once my anger at Spokeshave's contemptible nonsense.
Through the clumsiness of Mr Spokeshave, who had charge of our signal department and showed his cleverness by hoisting the very numbers of the flags giving the skipper's reply, that, though our engines were temporarily broken-down, they were fast being repaired, the captain of the man-of-war could not understand him; and so, fearing the worst, ranged up under our stern to see what help he could render, in what he evidently considered, from Spokeshave's "hoist," to be a pressing emergency.
"Wha wha what's the matter with that now, old chap? One would think it was a whale and not a gudgeon, you make such a fuss about it." Of course the captain's joke set us all off cackling again; Mr Spokeshave's "he-he-he" sounding out, high in the treble, above the general cachination. This exasperated Mr Stokes, making the old fellow quite furious.
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