Pon my
honour, if I weren't dead stony broke I'd give you a drink either in
this place or----"

"Damn your drinks, you lucky man. If your boat and my knowledge doesn't
transmogrify us from a pair of stone-brokes into a couple of bloated
millionaires, I'm a Dutchman. Come along, man. Come along now."

CHAPTER VI.

FORE AND AFT SEAMANSHIP.

It has been my fate to put to sea in some of the worst-found craft that
ever scrambled into port again, but of the lot, that ugly little cutter
of Haigh's stands pre-eminent.

She possessed no single good point in her favour. She had swung in
harbour so long that everywhere above the water-line she was as staunch
as a herring-net. Her standing rigging, being of wire, was merely
rusted, but her running gear was something too appalling to think
about. As for her bottom, if she had been turned up and dried for a day
(so Haigh cheerfully averred), there would have been enough bushy cover
on it to put down pheasants in. Fittings, even the barest necessaries,
were painfully lacking, as the man had been living riotously on them
for over a month and a half. A Chinese pirate could not have picked her
much cleaner. What he was pleased to term the "superfluities of the
main and after cabins" had gone first, fetching fair prices. Afterwards
he had peddled his gear little by little, dining one day off a
riding-light, going to a theatre the next on two marline spikes and a
sister-block, and so on. His ground tackle, long saved up for a
_bonne bouche_, had provided funds for that last night in the
gambling hell, where we both got cleared out together; and the balance
that was left didn't represent a mosquito's ransom.

Haigh told me all this as we walked back again down the narrow streets
to the quay, and I suggested that although Mediterranean air was good,
we couldn't exactly live on it during the passage across. But he
pointed out that as his dinghy was very old and rotten, it would be
quite a useless encumbrance on the cruise; and so, dropping me on board
the cutter, he sculled off again to swap this old wreck for provisions.

I roused out a weather-thinned mainsail, black with mildew, and bent
it; and by the time that was on the spars, he had completed his barter,
and had been put on board again by a friend.

We had a dozen words of conversation, and then got small canvas hoisted
and quietly slipped moorings. The night was very black, and thick with
driving rain; and we slid ou