When it was too late the third mate turned attention to his duties again, and had just time to give four frenzied orders; there was a fine jangling of the engine-room telegraph; the quartermaster did frantic windmill work on the steering wheel, to the accompaniment of a rattling chorus from the wheel engines below; but the _M'poso_ took a sheer and rammed her nose firmly into the mangroves. And in she slid. Weight and speed made sufficient momentum to put her into the mud and shrubbery well up to the forerigging, and the jar sent the stiff-set Captain Image flying onto the top of the fiddley gratings.
Carter shot up against the white painted rail of the upper bridge and held his balance there, and then with that blind instinct for interfering for the welfare of others which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon, he vaulted the rail, picked up Captain Image and set him on his feet.
It is perhaps typical also of the peppery Welshman that he forgot the enjoyable quarrel so promptly that he said, "Thank you, me lad," with ready cordiality before he turned to do full justice to the third mate, his ancestry, and his probable future in this world and the next.
"By Jove," broke in Carter, "I wish I'd a gun. There's a monkey on the foredeck. I'd like that little beggar's skin. I wonder if I could catch him."
"Don't you try, me lad," said Image. "The odds are that the front end of this packet's a menagerie of red mangrove ants that could gnaw chunks off a tin-covered crusader." He jammed the engine-room telegraph with a vicious whirr to Full Speed Astern, and turned to the unfortunate third mate. "Here, you, if you think you know enough to tell the difference between land and water, lower a boat and take out a kedge astern. Wait a minute. Now, you're not to drop that kedge in the mud. It'll draw through that like pulling a hairpin out of a pot of marmalade. You're to get ashore and hook it among those mangrove roots. Just try and get it into your intelligent head that I don't want that kedge to come home directly we put a strain on the wire. When you've done that you can come back and go to your room and read Shakespeare. I guess that's about all you blooming brass-bound Conway sailors are fit for, except sparking the girls and drawing your pay. By Crumbs! if we hadn't Miss Kate on board, and for anything I know within earshot, I could just give you an opinion of your looks that would make you want to cry."