The only break in the dead monotony of the afternoon was suggested in the general invitation to come for’ard and hear Gedge roast the captain. It went ill that day with any witness in Gillies’s favor.
In the middle of dinner people looked up from their plates and said: “What’s that?”
The bean-feaster was the first to find his tongue. “By ——,” he said, “we’ve stopped!” The passengers dropped their knives and forks and rushed on deck. The bean-feaster was right. In trying to get round the eastern shoulder of the floe, the Los Angeles had run aground in Norton Sound, thirty miles from the mainland. The engines were reversed, and the water round the propeller was set boiling. The ship never budged. The deck resounded to the uproar of many tongues. To waste thirty-six hours feeling her way round the floe was bad enough, but to be “hung up on a sand-bar,” a hundred and fifty miles from Nome, with a wicked-looking ice-pack bearing down on you from the west—! And here comes the Charles Nelson once more, very perky this time, profiting by the object lesson and steering clear of the bar. The Los Angeles humbled her pride to ask for a line. “Can’t get near enough,” the word came back. “I’m in three fathom now!” and away Charles Nelson goes, leaving the big steamer to her fate.
“What’s that feller calls himself a captain, what’s he goin’ to do?” demanded Mr. Gedge of his satellites. “‘Wait for the tide!’ Yah! He’s got the most high-spirited idears of any man I ever—‘Wait!’ After wastin’ two days and nights a’ready! ‘Wait!’ While the other fellers are knockin’ the bottom out o’ Nome!”
This was a harassing thought, but the captain still had his apologists, even in the Kangaroo Court. It was O’Gorman’s friend with the fiery beard who dared to point out, “Mr. Gedge told us on Friday and Saturday the captain was ‘incompetent and foolhardy.’ On Sunday and Monday he’s ‘over-cautious and damnably slow.’ To-night Mr. Gedge tells us—”
“To-night,” that gentleman shouted, “I’m tellin’ you still more about this —— captain. Did they or did they not say to us in Seattle that Gillies was a first-rate seaman?”
“Yes, and so he is!”
“Did they or did they not tell us he knew his job?”
“Right! Knows this ship as you know the way to your mouth.”
“Yah! Knows what she can do on the Japan route. But this, gentlemen and ladies, ain’t the road to Manila. And do you know what? This here is Captain Gillies’s first trip to Alaska!” Gedge brought it out with a sledge-hammer effect. The audience felt they were expected to be dumfounded. They complied.