“When that girl came aboard at Liverpool with her mackintosh and holdall and little black shiny bag,” he went on, “I just noticed her in a passing sort of way as a fresh-colored, tidy-looking young woman, rather plump in the bows, and with an air as though she meant to get her full money’s worth out of her eleven-pound fare. But our cheap tariff had filled the passenger-lists fairly full, and I’d a long score of things to attend to. A special derrick had had to be rigged to sling the elephant’s cage aboard, and a capital one it was, of sound Indian teak strengthened with steel—must have cost a mint of money. We stowed it, after a lot of sweat and swearing, on the promenade deck, abaft the funnels, bolting it to rings specially screwed in the deck, passing a wire hawser across the top, which was made fast to the port and starboard davits, and rigging weather-screens of double tarpaulin to keep Bingo warm and dry. The other beasts we shipped under the lee of the forward cabin skylight; and I’d just got through the job when a quiet ladylike voice at my elbow says:
“‘If you please, officer, with regard to my patient, I wish to know——’
“‘Ask the purser, ma’am,’ I said, rather snappishly, for I was hot and worried ... ‘or the head-stewardess.’
“‘I have asked them both,’ says the voice in a calm, determined way, ‘and have been referred to you.’
“‘By mistake,’ says the young lady—for a young lady she was, and a hospital nurse besides, neatly rigged out in the usual uniform—‘by mistake I have had allotted to me a bedroom on the ground-floor, so far from my patient that I cannot possibly hear him should he call me in the night. And,’ she went on, as the breeze played with her white silk bonnet-strings and the wavy little kinks of soft brown hair that framed her forehead, ‘and I want you to move me to the upper floor at once.’
“‘You mean the promenade deck, madam,’ says I, smoothing out a grin, though I’m well enough used to the odd bungles land-folks make over names of things at sea.”
The flying pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up, turning his shortened cigar between his teeth.
“When do we come to the elephant?” he asked.
“We’re at him now,” said the Second Officer. “‘You mean the promenade deck,’ says I. ‘Does your patient occupy one of the cabins on the port or the starboard side, and may I ask his number and name?’ Then she smiled at me brightly, her eyes and teeth making a sort of flash together. ‘He doesn’t have a cabin,’ says she; ‘he sleeps in a cage. My patient is Bingo, the elephant!’”