“Jimmy will be good, I reckon,” said the old man, “and he’s old enough now; so I should like for him to see a little of the world.”
“You’re a shareholder, like the rest of us,” said the captain, “and I don’t mean to seem disrespectful; but I think you’re acting hastily, Uncle Amasa, and I hope you won’t encourage Jimmy to feel that he has a right to come without my consent, for I should have to put him off, and that would be a humiliation, and I don’t want to embitter him any more than I can help. But I won’t have him on the ark, and that’s all I can say about it.”
“Well, well, we won’t discuss it, son; we won’t discuss it at all,” said Uncle Amasa. “But I’d like to know how ye think I would look going back to his widowed mother and telling her that you didn’t trust her only son to conduct himself as bravely as any of you?”
A smile broke over the young captain’s face at the idea of any such message going to the acrid lady who had made the Claibornes’ home-clearing a place to be cautiously approached and discreetly avoided. “I wouldn’t say anything to Maria at all,” he advised. “I would just gradually get Jimmy out of the notion.”
The captain felt that he had not come out of the argument at all well. It seemed rather absurd for a man to set himself against a boy—a boy, moreover, whom he had seen grow up—but there were so many reasons for Jimmy’s own sake why he should not be allowed to go that Uncle Amasa’s calm refusal to even consider them filled him with uneasiness. If the grandson proved as unimpressionable as the grandfather, there was trouble ahead. And Marion Royce felt that he was undertaking enough in this venture without adding anything that might bring about disorder or mutiny.
They went down the hill, the captain silent, Uncle Amasa gossiping cheerily as a snow-bird, and both men were soon at work on the great ninety-foot ark or “broadhorn” that still rested on its rude ways at the edge of the creek.
“We’ll get it into the water before night,” said the captain, looking lovingly at the unwieldy bulk that was more like a scow, built to be towed, than like a boat designed to navigate itself among channels and currents. It would, indeed, be more at the mercy of the elements than any scow, because its high freeboard would catch the wind as well as its clumsy upperdeck. It was built of rough hewn timbers, and put together with pins and treenails, so that it could be readily taken apart and sold as lumber for house-building in New Orleans, when its service as a cargo boat should be over.
Jonas Sparks, the old Marietta shipwright, who was overseeing the work, nodded at the captain. There was still a vast amount of decking or roofing to be done, and for this some of the lumber was still to be brought over from Marietta sawmill.
“It would be a good job done,” said Jonas Sparks, “if you could get your timber sawed up to Marietta while she is swelling. It will save that much time.”
“The new Pittsburgh mill hands haven’t come,” said the captain, “and they can’t get enough men at Marietta to work on the new brig and run the mill. The men won’t work. I expect we’ll have to go up and saw the lumber ourselves. What do you think?”