Some half-hour later, the half-deck sentry put his head into the gun-room: "The Sub-lootenant wants Mr. Orphan--in his cabin."
That young gentleman had wagered that he could drink a bottle of soda water more quickly than Bubbles could, and happened to be employed in the process of deciding this. The first trial had resulted in a dead heat, but the second had ended rather disastrously for both; and though the others patted him on the back with any heavy, unsuitable article they could find, he had not quite recovered himself when he burst into the Sub's cabin.
The Sub was excited again. When he was excited his eyes burnt like coals and his mouth was a slit, tightly shut--shut like a rat-trap.
"Orphan! my jumping Orphan! we've got it--you and I and your rotten old picket-boat. Guess what we've got to do, my 'JJ.'! It's simply too grand!"
He lighted his pipe. The cabin was already so full of smoke that the Orphan was coughing.
"What is it?" he gasped--the soda water inside him still busy.
"Have a cigarette?" the Sub said, shoving a box towards him.
"I'm not eighteen yet!" the Orphan said, thinking that the Sub perhaps had forgotten and might beat him afterwards.
"You'll have to be twenty-eight to-night, my jumping Son--thirty-eight; you've got the chance of a lifetime. Squat down on the wash-stand."
"Jumping Moses!--you and I have to go in to-night and stick a light on a mark-buoy--a Turkish mark-buoy they've fixed in the wrong place, close inshore it is, under the old fort. What do you think of that?"
"What mark-buoy?" asked the Orphan. "How ripping!"
The Sub drew a few rough outlines on a piece of paper. "There's the fort, and that's the line of the low bit of land sweeping away to the right. It sticks out a bit farther along, and just off the 'stick out' place the mark-buoy should mark a shoal, but the Turks have shifted it farther in--just about there"--and he marked a cross on the paper--"to bother us. And we've got to find it to-night, and stick a red light on it. How's that for 'good'?"
"They'll see us, won't they?" the Orphan said, catching his breath again, for he knew that at least three search-lights swept the approach and the minefield--a big one on Yeni Kali itself, "Glaring Gertrude", and two this side of the mine-field, from somewhere down by the water's edge--"Peeping Tom" and "Squinting Susan"; two much less powerful lights these were.