'"Hi! Hoi!" the green ship says. "Come alongside, honest man, and I'll buy your load. I'm Fenner that fought the seven Portugals--clean out of shot or bullets. Frankie knows me." '"Ay, but I don't," I says, and I slacked nothing. 'He was a masterpiece. Seein' I was for goin' on, he hails a Bridport hoy beyond us and shouts, "George! Oh, George! Wing that duck. He's fat!" An' true as we're all here, that squatty Bridport boat rounds to acrost our bows, intending to stop us by means o' shooting. 'My Aunt looks over our rail. "George," she says, "you finish with your enemies afore you begin on your friends." 'Him that was laying the liddle swivel-gun at us sweeps off his hat an' calls her Queen Bess, and asks if she was selling liquor to pore dry sailors. My Aunt answered him quite a piece. She was a notable woman. 'Then _he_ come up--his long pennant trailing overside--his waistcloths and netting tore all to pieces where the Spanishers had grappled, and his sides black-smeared with their gun-blasts like candle-smoke in a bottle. We hooked on to a lower port and hung. '"Oh, Mus' Drake! Mus' Drake," I calls up. 'He stood on the great anchor cathead, his shirt open to the middle, and his face shining like the sun. '"Why, Sim!" he says. Just like that--after twenty year! "Sim," he says, "what brings you?" '"Pudden," I says, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. "You told me to bring cannon-shot next time, an' I've brought 'em." 'He saw we had. He ripped out a fathom and a half o' brimstone Spanish, and he swung down on our rail, and he kissed me before all his fine young captains. His men was swarming out of the lower ports ready to unload us. When he saw how I'd considered all his likely wants, he kissed me again. '"Here's a friend that sticketh closer than a brother!" he says. "Mistress," he says to my Aunt, "all you foretold on me was true. I've opened that road from the East to the West, and I've buried my heart beside it." "I know," she says. "That's why I be come." '"But ye never foretold this"; he points to both they great fleets. '"This don't seem to me to make much odds compared to what happens _to_ a man," she says. "Do it?" '"Certain sure a man forgets to remember when he's proper mucked up with work. Sim," he says to me, "we must shift every living Spanisher round Dunkirk corner on to our Dutch sands before morning. The wind'll come out of the North after this calm--same as it used--and then they're our meat." '"Amen," says I. "I've brought you what I could scutchel up of odds and ends. Be you hit anywhere to signify?" '"Oh, our folk'll attend to all that when we've time," he says. He turns to talk to my Aunt, while his men flew the stuff out of our hold. I think I saw old Moon amongst 'em, but we was too busy to more than nod like. Yet the Spanishers was going to prayers with their bells and candles before we'd cleaned out the _Antony_. Twenty-two ton o' useful stuff I'd fetched him.