Sanford looked him all over, from his shoes to his cap. He knew a round full man when he saw him. This one seemed to be without a flaw. Sanford saw too that he possessed that yeast of good nature without which the best of men are heavy and dull.
“Can you lift these blocks, Captain Brandt?” he asked in a hearty tone, more like that of a comrade than an employer, his hand extended in greeting.
“Well, I can try, sir,” came the modest reply, the young man’s face lighting up as he looked into Sanford’s eyes, where he read with equal quickness a ready appreciation, so encouraging to every man who intends to do his best.
Captain Brandt and every member of the gang knew that it was not the mere weight of these enrockment blocks which made the handling of them so serious a matter; twelve tons is a light lift for many boat-derricks. It was the fact that they must be loaded aboard a vessel not only small enough to be easily handled in any reasonable weather, but with a water-draught shoal enough to permit her lying safely in a running tide alongside the Ledge while the individual blocks were being lowered over her side.
The hangers-on about the dock questioned whether any sloop could do this work. All winter, in fact, they had discussed it about the tavern stoves.
“Billy,” said old Marrows, an assumed authority on stone-sloops, but not in Sanford’s employ, although a constant applicant, “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ agin her beam, mind, but she’s too peaked forrud. ’Nother thing, when she’s got them stones slung, them chain-plates won’t hold ’er shrouds. I wouldn’t be s’prised to see that mast jerked clean out’er her.”
Bill Lacey, the handsome young rigger to whom the remark was addressed, leaned over the sloop’s rail, scanned every bolt in her plates, glanced up at the standing rigging, tried it with his hand as if it were a tight-rope, and with a satisfied air answered, “Them plates is all right, Marrows,—it’s her b’iler that’s a-worryin’ me. What do you say, Caleb?” turning to Caleb West, a broad-shouldered, grizzled man in a sou’wester, who was mending a leak in a diving-dress, the odor of the burning cement in a pan beside him mingling with the savory smell of frying pork coming up from the galley.
“Wall, I ain’t said, Billy,” replied Caleb in a cheery voice, stroking his bushy gray beard. “Them as don’t know better keep shet.”
There was a loud laugh at the young rigger’s expense, in which everybody except Lacey and Caleb joined. Lacey’s face hardened under the thrust, while Caleb still smiled, a quaint expression overspreading his features,—one that often came when something pleased him, and which by its sweetness showed how little venom lay behind his reproofs.
“These ’ere sloops is jes’ like women,” said George Nickles, the cook, a big, oily man, with his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, a greasy apron about his waist. He was dipping a bucket overboard. “Ye can’t tell nothin’ about ’em till ye tries ’em.”