He traced the lines of the uncongenial record with a stumpy forefinger.
“‘Winds puffey and varible. Ship scarcely moveing.’
“‘Very light airs.’
“‘Dead calm.’
“Wonder where old Jones and his blooming ‘Alcazar’ are,” he reflected. He sighed and closed the book.
No faintest air entered the stuffy little room. The voices of the men as they growled and grumbled over their work came clearly to him through the open port. From below there drifted up a pleasant tinkle and chink of crockery and cutlery as the steward laid the cabin dinner.
Through the open companion he could see the helmsman lolling beside the wheel, his outstretched arm resting along its rim, his fingers loosely gripping the spokes. He had for once the easiest job in the ship. It was not always so, for, though the “Parisina,” rightly handled, steered like a lamb, she needed humouring as much as a horse with a fine mouth. He was a handsome fellow, swarthy and black-eyed; under the thick growth of hair on his broad chest showed faintly some tattooed device in red and blue, a relic of his younger and less hirsute years.
A barefooted apprentice padded up the poop ladder and struck one bell: a mellow note that hung trembling on the still air, till it quivered away into silence high up among the sleeping royals. The boy wore a patched shirt and ragged dungaree trousers, and his arms and legs were burned black as mahogany by the tropic sun. He was a tall lad, with the lanky grace of adolescence; a faint down was just showing on his upper lip, and the sun gleaming upon the growth of fair hair on his arms and chest made him look as if powdered with gold dust.
Captain Fareweather sighed, put the log-book by, and descended to the cabin. McAllister, the second mate, a big-boned Aberdonian, perennially hungry, was already there, with one eye on the hash the steward had just set before the Old Man’s chair. He composed his features into an appropriate cast of pious decorum as the captain took his seat and placed his hand before his eyes for his customary grace. This rite was silent and lengthy; but Captain Fareweather’s officers knew better than to betray impatience or inattention while it lasted. Legend said that a second mate, greatly daring, had once begun to nibble his bread before the captain had finished, and at once there had come a voice from the behind the hand, like the voice of Mitche Manitou the Mighty, “Ye irreverential devil, can’t ye see I’m sayin’ grace?”
It was an uncomfortable meal. The skipper was moody, and McAllister was horribly nervous in consequence. The few small pebbles of conversation he cast into the silence fell with an appalling splash which instantly covered him with scarlet confusion to the tips of his large red ears, and it was with profound thankfulness that he welcomed the appearance of the mate with a basket of oranges.