Page:Wren--The young stagers.djvu/159

Rh The Crew got up, yawned, shook himself again and took a stroll around the raft—which looked uncommonly like an inverted four-legged table.

"Oh, look at that wretched Crew, he's gone and sat on the food. He did that on purpose so that we should give it him," yelped the anguished Bo'sun, pointing to where Venus was apparently playing at being a hen with chicks.

"That settles it," said the Captain wrathfully.

"The Crew shall be fattened up on the lunch biscuit and the slice of apple, and then the Lot shall be Cast upon him. We can still eat the chocolates as they're wrapped in silver paper."

The Crew, either ignorant of its fate, or truly philosophic, disposed of the offered biscuit in two gulps, but apparently reserved the slice of apple for even more parlous times. And as with fatuous smile and self-satisfied tail waggings the Crew perambulated the raft, the Captain laboriously scrawled with fateful pencil upon an old luggage label the ominous words LOT I. Having done this to his satisfaction, the Captain directed the Bo'sun to seize and secure the Crew