Page:Many inventions (IA manyinventions00kipliala).pdf/136

 We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that we were idle for we still swung to and fro. Will you never let us go? The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to the bone with salt cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lipe were cut to our gums and you whipped us because we could not row. Will you never let us go? But in a little time we shall run out of the portholes as the water rung along the oar-blade, and though you tell the others to row after us you will never catch us till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up the winds in the belly of the sail. Aho! Will you never let us go?'

'H'm. What's oar-thresh, Charlie?'

'The water washed up by the oars, That's the sort of song they might sing in the galley y' know. Aren't you ever going to finish that story and give me some of the profits?'

'It depends on yourself. If you had only told me tore about your hero in the first instance it might have been finished by now. You're so hazy in your notions,'

'I only want to give you the general notion of it—the knocking about from place to place and the fighting and all that. Can't you fill in the rest yourself? Make the hero save a girl on a pirate-galley and marry her or do something.'

'You're a really helpful collaborator, I suppose the hero went through some few adventures before he married,'

'Well then, make him a very artful card—a low sort of man—a sort of political man who went about making treaties and breaking them—a black-haired chap who hid behind the mast when the fighting began,'

'But you said the other day that he was red-haired.'