"
I could not see what followed, but Moorshed said: "Take another man with
you. If you lose the tow, you're done. I'll slow her down."
I heard the dinghy splash overboard ere I could cry "Murder!" Heard the
rasp of a boat-hook along the wire-rope, and then, as it had been in my
ear, Pyecroft's enormous and jubilant bellow astern: "Why, he's here!
Right atop of us! The blighter 'as pouched half the tow, like a shark!" A
long pause filled with soft Devonian bleatings. Then Pyecroft, _solo
arpeggie_: "Rum? Rum? Rum? Is that all? Come an' try it, uncle."
I lifted my face to where once God's sky had been, and besought The Trues
I might not die inarticulate, amid these half-worked miracles, but live at
least till my fellow-mortals could be made one-millionth as happy as I was
happy. I prayed and I waited, and we went slow--slow as the processes of
evolution--till the boat-hook rasped again.
"He's not what you might call a scientific navigator," said Pyecroft,
still in the dinghy, but rising like a fairy from a pantomime trap. "The
lead's what 'e goes by mostly; rum is what he's come for; an' Brixham is
'is 'ome. Lay on, Mucduff!"
A white whiskered man in a frock-coat--as I live by bread, a frock-coat!--
sea-boots, and a comforter crawled over the torpedo-tube into Moorshed's
grip and vanished forward.
"'E'll probably 'old three gallon (look sharp with that dinghy!); but 'is
nephew, left in charge of the _Agatha_, wants two bottles command-
allowance.
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