Mr. Michael Doyle, mate of the skysail yarder “Bride of Abydos,” was usually nearly as handy with his tongue as he was with his fists, which was saying a good deal. But on this occasion he was, for once in his life, fairly stumped. He opened and shut his mouth several times like a landed fish, but, like a fish, remained speechless.
“Too rough with ’em, that’s what you are,” pursued the skipper. “You should use a bit o’ tact. You shouldn’t keep kickin’ ’em. I’m a humane man myself, and I tell you I take it very hard—very hard indeed I do—to have my ship avoided as if we’d got plague on board just because I’ve got a rip-roarin’ great gazebo of a mate from the County Cork that doesn’t know when to keep his feet to himself. When I was a nipper they learned me to count ten before I kicked. That’s what you want to do. Twenty for the matter o’ that.”
Captain Bascomb was a hard case, though anyone overhearing the foregoing remarks might have thought otherwise. He was also a tough nut. Men who spoke from personal experience said, and said with deep emotion, that he was both these things, as well as other things less fitted for polite mention: so presumably it was true.
Now, while there are undeniably times and seasons when it is a valuable asset for a shipmaster to have the character of a tough nut and a hard case, there are equally conceivable circumstances when such a reputation may be a decidedly inconvenient possession. And it was precisely such a set of circumstances which had arisen on the day in late autumn when the conversation just recorded took place.
The “Bride of Abydos” lay alongside the lumber mill wharf at Victoria. Her cargo of lumber was all on board. And she would have been ready to sail for home on the next morning’s tide but for one trifling and inconvenient particular—namely, that she was without a crew.
This regrettable discrepancy was due to two principal reasons. In the first place, the rumour of a discovery of gold, or copper, or aluminium, or something of a metallic nature up in the Rocky Mountains had had the inevitable effect of inducing the ship’s company of the “Bride of Abydos” to abandon as one man their nautical calling, and depart for the interior of British Columbia with an unbounded enthusiasm which would only be surpassed by the enthusiasm with which they would doubtless return to it in less than three months’ time.
But it would be useless to deny that Captain Bascomb’s fame as a tough nut—a fame to which the ungrudging tributes of his late crew had given a considerable local fillip—was the outstanding cause for the coyness manifested by eligible substitutes about coming forward to fill the vacant berths in the “Bride of Abydos’s” forecastle.
Hence it was that gloom sat upon Captain Bascomb’s brow, and a reflected gloom upon that of Mr. Michael Doyle—a gloom which was graphically expressed by the steward when he imparted to the black doctor in confidence the news that the Old Man was lookin’ about as pleasant as a calf’s daddy.
Mr. Doyle delicately brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat, and cleared his throat cautiously by way of preparing the ground for another conversational opening.
“What do you keep making that row for?” demanded the skipper. “You put me in mind of a cock chicken that’s just learnin’ to crow! If you do it again I’ll mix you some cough stuff—and I’ll see you swallow it too.”