From her archaic
torpedo-tubes at the stern, and quick-firers forward and amidship, she
must have dated from the early nineties. Hammerings and clinkings, with
spurts of steam and fumes of hot oil, arose from her inside, and a figure
in a striped jersey squatted on the engine-room gratings.
"She ain't much of a war-canoe, but you'll see more life in 'er than on an
whole squadron of bleedin' _Pedantics."_
"But she's laid up here--and Blue Fleet have gone," I protested.
"Precisely. Only, in his comprehensive orders Frankie didn't put us out of
action. Thus we're a non-neglectable fightin' factor which you mightn't
think from this elevation; _an'_ m'rover, Red Fleet don't know we're 'ere.
Most of us"--he glanced proudly at his boots--"didn't run to spurs, but
we're disguised pretty devious, as you might say. Morgan, our signaliser,
when last seen, was a Dawlish bathing-machine proprietor. Hinchcliffe was
naturally a German waiter, and me you behold as a squire of low degree;
while yonder Levantine dragoman on the hatch is our Mr. Moorshed. He was
the second cutter's snotty--_my_ snotty--on the _Archimandrite_--two
years--Cape Station. Likewise on the West Coast, mangrove swampin', an'
gettin' the cutter stove in on small an' unlikely bars, an' manufacturin'
lies to correspond. What I don't know about Mr. Moorshed is precisely the
same gauge as what Mr. Moorshed don't know about me--half a millimetre, as
you might say.
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