“Louis Gist says you won’t let me go on the ark,” he said, fixing the young captain with his sombre, discontented eyes. “I guess Uncle Amasa could make you, seeing what a share we’ve got in the cargo, but I just wanted to ask you if it’s true—what Louis said—that you don’t want me.”
Marion wished, as he looked gravely at the boy, that the ark were not taking the Claibornes’ share of the cargo at all, but he only said:
“That depends on yourself, Jimmy.”
Jimmy made no answer in words. He turned and strode off towards the woods behind the schoolhouse clearing. Marion called to him, but he gave no sign of hearing, and after waiting a moment longer Marion went back to his work.
CHAPTER II
THE ARK IS LAUNCHED
Young Captain Royce went slowly back to the shipyard, thinking of the sullen look in Jimmy Claiborne’s eyes.
“The boy means to make trouble,” he said to himself. But beyond the annoyance which would result from being obliged to refuse, if Jimmy got Uncle Amasa to plead for him, there seemed to be nothing much that Jimmy could do. Young as he was—scarcely twenty-two—Marion Royce had already won the confidence of the settlement by his courage and coolness, and those who had chosen him as leader and captain would certainly uphold him in any position which he might take in regard to the selection of his crew. But between being merely upheld in a disagreeable duty, and having the cordial good feeling of all the shareholders, there was much to choose.
He was tempted, as he went along through the woods between the little shipyard and the schoolhouse, to turn a deaf ear to his own better judgment. But he had made three trips down the river to New Orleans, and he knew the importance of an efficient crew, just as he knew the danger of a single insubordinate spirit.