I felt very irritated, and when she said: "Let me come aboard and photograph that dear Mr. Scarlett," I felt more annoyed than ever. At that time of the morning the _Bunder Abbas_ wasn’t clean and tidy, so I answered rather cuttingly that I’d send the gunner ashore to be photographed, and suggested that perhaps she’d better wait until her brother or the political agent’s wife could bring her on board some other time. She smiled again her mocking smile, and, curtsying derisively, watched me clambering clumsily into the dinghy, trying not to wet my feet. With her eyes on me I felt like an elephant trying to get into a canoe, and one of my feet slipped and went into the water. That buckskin shoe was pretty well spoiled. When Griffiths shoved off—still grinning the brute was—I looked back to salute; but she was already walking away from the beach and did not turn her head. "She’s offended now," I thought. "Serve her jolly well right! Fancy asking herself aboard like that; no English girl would have dreamt of doing such a thing!" However, I was not really in the least pleased, and Mr. Scarlett soon found out that I was in a pretty bad temper. Commander Duckworth had ordered me to lie at Jask until replies to his telegrams had been received from the Admiral, so there I had to stay—possibly for days. The morning went by very slowly. I was in a thoroughly bad temper, and didn’t care a "buttered biscuit" whether the six-pounder’s recoil springs wanted adjusting or not; and when the lascar first-driver reported that the packing in the high-pressure piston-rod gland was not as tight as it should be, dragging me down below to see it, I cursed him till he salaamed a hundred times a minute to appease me. Moore, too, reported Ellis again for giving him "lip", and went away "with a flea in his ear". I could not get the idea out of my head that those Afghans would come back and attack the place. Those wire entanglements and earthworks looked such puny things to keep back those fierce chaps who had faced our Maxims and six-pounder near Bungi, that if they really meant business, fifty rifles would not keep them out. It was such hard luck on those two women. The political agent and Borsen did not count. They’d gone into the job with their eyes open, but the women—well, that was different. They should never have been allowed to come to this desolate, exposed, out-of-the-way spot, on the very edge of civilization. Those mountains, too, were only twenty miles away; the Afghans could swoop down from them in a night, appear as unexpectedly as a vulture, get between the telegraph station and old Jask, with its fifty Bedouin border police, and cut it off entirely.