Renner, the officer of the deck at
the time.
"Now Mr. Renner was a new-made ensign, and we all of us here been long
enough in the service to know how it is about a middy that's just got
his commission. We all know how it is with ourselves when we first get
our C.P.O.--except you, Reggie, and you'll get yours some day. Am I
right? Sure I am. If there's one thing on earth we're going to do then,
it's to live up to regulations.
"No, we'll never again remember so much about rules and regulations as
we do then. No catching us in anything irregular; no sir. And so with
Mr. Renner, the new-made ensign. He brings out the blue-book and shows
the boson. 'Look,' he says. 'Paragraph fourteen thousand four hundred
and forty-two,' or whatever it was. 'Hose,' he goes on to read, 'is
expendible property, to be surveyed and wiped off the property-books by
condemning to the scrap-heap and sold in the open market to the highest
bidder. There,' says our new-made ensign to our boson, 'what it says.
And according to that, the admiral himself couldn't take that hose from
that scrap-heap without authority. No, not if it was no more than an old
shoe-lace, he couldn't.'
"'But that won't fill our water-tanks, and I'd like to use that hose,
sir,' says the boson.
"'M-m!' says Mr. Renner. 'M-m! now if Mr. Shinn was aboard--' Mr. Shinn
was our executive. 'But Mr.
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