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“Well, I waited four hours for his nibs. When he come to his office quarters he was ’bout up to my arms, red as a can-buoy, and white hair stickin’ up straight as a shoe-brush on his head. He looked cross enough to bite a tenpenny nail in two.

“‘Ran into the dock, did ye–ran into Her Majesty’s dock, and ye had room enough to turn a fleet in! Do you think we paint these docks for the fun of havin’ you lubbers scrape it off? You’ll pay for paintin’ it over, sir–that’s what you’ll do, or I’ll libel your boat, and send a file of marines down and tie her up,’ and away he went up the dock to his office again.

“‘Gosh!’ I said to myself. ‘Guess I’m in a fix,’ The boys stood around and heard every word, and I tell ye it warn’t no joke. As to money, there warn’t a ten-dollar bill in the crew. I’d spent every cent I could rake and scrape to fit the Screamer out, and the boys were workin’ on shares, and nobody was to get any money until the last stone–that big twenty-one-ton feller–was ‘board the brig. Then I could go to the agents in Hamilton and draw two-thirds of my contract. That twenty-one-ton chunk, I forgot to tell ye, I had picked up the day before, and it was then aboard the Screamer, and we was on our way down to Hamilton, where the brig lay, when her nose scraped off the Admiral’s paint.

“It did look kind o’ nasty for us, and no mistake. One day more, and we’d ‘a’ been through and had our money.

“‘Go up and see him,’ said the watchman. ‘He gits cool sometimes as sudden as he gits hot.’ So Bill Nevins, my engineer, who was workin’ the h’ister, and I went up. The old feller was sittin’ on the piazza in a big rattan chair.

“‘Come aboard,’ he hollered, soon’s he see Bill and me a-standin’ in the garden-path with our hats off, lookin’ like two jailbirds about to be sentenced. Well, we got up on the porch, and he looked us all over, and said:

“‘Have you got that money with you?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t,’ and I ups and tells him just how we was fixed, and how we had worked, and how short we was of grub and clothes and money, and then I said, ‘an’ now I come to tell ye that I hit the dock fair and square, and it was all my fault, and that I’ll pay whatever you say is right when I put this stone ‘board and get my pay.’

“He looked me all over–I tell you I was pretty ragged; nothin’ but a shirt and pants on, and they was almighty tore up, especially where most everybody wants to be covered–and Bill was no better. We’d ’bout used up our clo’es so that sail-needles nor nothin’ else wouldn’t a-done us no good, and we had no time nor no spare cash to go ashore and get others.

“While I was a-talkin’, the old feller’s eyes was a-borin’ into mine–then he roared out, ‘No, sir; you won’t!–you won’t pay one d–d shillin’, sir. You’ll go back to your work, and if there’s anything you want in the way of grub or supplies send here for it and you shall have it. Good-day.’ I tell ye he was a rum one.”

“Was that the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“Not much. When we got ‘longside the brig the next day, her Cap’n see that twenty-one-ton stone settin’ up on the deck of the Screamer, lookin’ like a big white church, and he got so scared he went ashore and started a yarn that we couldn’t lift that stone sixteen feet in the air, and over her rail and down into the hold, and that we’d smash his brig, and it got to the Admiral’s ears, and down come two English engineers, in cork helmets and white jackets and gold buttons, spic’ an’ span as if they’d stepped out of the chart-room of a yacht. One was a colonel and the other was a major. They were both just back from India, and natty-lookin’ chaps as you ever saw. And clear stuff all the way through–you could tell that before they opened their mouths.