“Ain’t the men never goin’ to get their pay notes?” piped up the woman in the hammock.

“Enough o’ that,” roared Bush, suddenly. He pushed forward anxious to save his captain from the insults to which he was exposed, thanks to a government which left its men still unpaid after a month in port. “You there, what are you doing in your hammock after eight bells?”

But this attempt to assume a counter offensive met with disaster.

“I’ll come out if you like, Mr. Lieutenant,” she said, flicking off her blanket and sliding to the deck. “I parted with my gown to buy my Tom a sausage, and my petticoat’s bought him a soop o’ West Country ale. Would you have me on deck in my shift, Mr. Lieutenant?”

A titter went round the deck.

“Get back and be decent,” spluttered Bush, on fire with embarrassment.

Hornblower was laughing, too—perhaps it was because he was married that the sight of a half-naked woman alarmed him not nearly as much as it did his first lieutenant.

“Never will I be decent now,” said the woman, swinging her legs up into the hammock and composedly draping the blanket over her, “until my Tom gets his pay warrant.”

“An’ when he gets it,” sneered the fair woman. “What can he do with it without shore leave? Sell it to a bumboat shark for a quarter!”

“Fi’ pound for twenty-three months’ pay!” added another. “An me a month gone a’ready.”

“Avast there,” said Bush.

Hornblower beat a retreat, abandoning—forgetting, rather—the object of his visit of inspection below. He could not face those women when the question of pay came up again. The men had been scandalously badly treated, imprisoned in the ship within sight of land, and their wives (some of them certainly were wives, although by Admiralty regulations a simple verbal declaration of the existence of a marriage was sufficient to allow them on board) had just cause of complaint. No one, not even Bush, knew that the few guineas which had been doled out among the crew represented a large part of Hornblower’s accumulated pay—all he could spare, in fact, except for the necessary money to pay his officers’ expenses when they should start on their recruiting journeys.