“Not another word, I told you, unless you want the cat!” answered Captain Williamson.
He drew himself up, and his eyes flashed dangerously, and the men silently left him and resumed their work in the forward part of the ship.
“Sailors are queer fellows,” was Dr. Blade’s comment. “Once they get an idea in their heads, you can’t drive it out.”
“I’ll drive it out, don’t fear!” answered the captain.
“It is too bad that the boys have made such enemies,” went on the ship’s physician. “I am afraid it will spoil a good deal of their pleasure.”
When the chums came back to the steamer that evening, they noticed that two of the sailors looked at them darkly. Yet nothing was said to them of what had occurred, the sailors being afraid to speak, and the others not wishing to make the boys uneasy.
But among the sailors there was quite a talk over Andy and Chet.
“We’ll make ’em stay ashore if we can,” said Loggermore. “Just wait until we are ready to sail. I am not going to trust myself with fellows like that to bring me bad luck.”
The repairs to the Ice King took the best part of a week to make, but at the end of that time the ship’s carpenter pronounced the craft as seaworthy as ever.
“She may stay up here for a year now, and never start those seams again,” he said.