“So-long, nipper!” said Thompson to Donald. “Good luck to you in future. We’ll maybe meet again some day!” Chubby wrung Donald’s hand but said nothing. His heart was too full for words. “So long, Chubby!” said McKenzie. “Try and make Uncle give you your premium back, but don’t say that I’m alive. So long!”
Joak McGlashan remained with Captain Nickerson and Donald. He would stay a while and try his hand “cookin’ at the fushin’” before going home, and he, like Donald, would sail in the wake of the redoubtable Judson Nickerson, and see where that worthy would lead them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Naow, boys,” Nickerson was saying, “we’ll take the little packet steamer to-night an’ go home to my people’s place daown the shore at Eastville Harbor. It’s a little fishing an’ boat-building taown, but it’s a pleasant place an’ pleasant folks live there. I called the old mother up on the telephone a while back an’ told her I was blowing home with a couple o’ ship-mates and they’ll sure give us a welcome!”
“How about getting some decent clothes,” ventured Donald, looking ruefully at his rough sea-duds.
“Clothes be hanged!” ejaculated the skipper. “Get a hair-cut and a bath—that’s more to the point. We’re not sticklers for clothes daown aour way. Buy clothes when you’ve money to blow—not when you’ve a measly twenty dollars in your jeans between you and destitution.”
Donald had been paid at the rate of twenty-five dollars a month for the trip around, and Nickerson had also squared up his indebtedness to Donald’s father. Of the hundred and fifty dollars which he had received, Donald remitted one hundred and twenty-five to his mother—telling her to keep it for passage-money when he had prepared a home in Canada for her to join him. Joak, as cook, drew one hundred and sixty dollars out of the venture, while Nickerson had a roll of bills in his pocket as thick around as a cable hawser.
Giving their sea-bags to an expressman to deliver at the boat, the trio loafed around Halifax until evening, when they boarded a little wooden steamer with a high superstructure aft and a fore-deck piled with barrels and boxes of assorted merchandise. A middle-aged man in shirt sleeves, with a rotund form and round, red, good-humored face leaned out of the wheel-house window smoking and watching the deck-hands chocking and lashing the cargo. To this worthy, Captain Nickerson shouted facetiously.