Three months have passed away since the adventure at the eagle’s nest. So swiftly, too, they have fled that it seems to our heroes but yesterday that the little cutter spread her white sails to the wind, and headed down the loch for Fort Augustus. And all the time they have been cruising, with varied fortunes, up and down among the Western Isles. When I say that the time has passed swiftly, it is equivalent to telling you that the brave crew of the Flower of Arrandoon have enjoyed themselves, and this again you will readily guess is equivalent to saying that it had not been all plain sailing with them; had it been so, the very monotony of such a cruise, and the lack of adventure, would have rendered it distasteful to them. In this bright, beautiful world of ours you may find seas in which, during the months of summer, you can cruise in the most flimsy of yachts, among islands, too, as lovely as dreamland, where the wind is never higher than a gentle breeze, nor the waves than a ripple, and where danger is hardly ever to be encountered; but such a dolce far niente existence is not for youth; youth should be no lotus-eater, and so McBain had done well in choosing for his young pupils the cruising ground on which they now were sailing. They had had a taste of all kinds of Highland summer weather—true it had been mostly fine—but many a stiff breeze they had had to face nevertheless, and they soon learned to do so cheerily, and to feel just as happy under their glittering oilskins and sou’-westers, with half a gale tearing through the rigging, and the spray dashing most uncomfortably in their teeth and eyes, as they did when, with all sail set, they glided calmly over the rippling sea, the sun shining brightly overhead, and the purple mist of distance half hiding the rugged mountains. McBain knew exactly what the cutter could do, and to use his own phrase, he just kept her at it. In fact he got to love the boat, and he used to talk about her as a living thing. And so she really appeared to be, for although she almost invariably did all that was required of her, there were days when she seemed to evince a will and determination of her own, and to want to shake herself free of all control.
“Wo, my beauty?” McBain would say when she was particularly disobedient, talking to her as if she were a restless hunter; but he would smile quaintly as he spoke, for the vessel’s little eccentricities only served to show off his seamanship. He said he knew how to manage her, and so he did. So he used to play with her, as it were, while in a sea-way or on a wind, and delighted in showing off her good qualities. Not that he did a great deal of the manual labour himself. Was he not master, and were not Ralph, Allan, and Rory not only his crew, but his pupils as well? It would have been unfair to them, then, if they had not been allowed to do all they had a mind to, and that, I assure you, was nearly everything that was to be done. But McBain had all the orders to give when sailing, especially if there was a bit of a blow on.
I am rambling on with my tale now in a kind of a gossiping fashion; but it is not without a purpose. I wish you to know as clearly as possible what manner of man McBain was, because you will see him in several different strange positions before he finally disappears from off the boards.
Well, then, when giving his orders, he never talked a bit louder nor quicker than there was any occasion for. He knew by experience that a command given in a sharp, loud key, was very likely to cause nervousness and slight confusion in obeying it. Woe is me for your officers on board big ships—and there are many of them too—who, while giving orders, strut about the decks, and stamp and yell at their men; they do but excite them, and cause them to give proof of the proverb, “The more hurry the less speed.” More than once have I seen a good ship’s safety jeopardised in a squall, and all through this fault in the officer carrying on duty. But you see McBain loved the crew—he loved “his boys,” as he was fond of calling them, and he was wishful to impart to them in a friendly way all the knowledge of boats that he himself possessed.
If you had called McBain a sailor, he would have replied,—
“No, sir, I’m not a sailor; I’m only a boatman, or a fisherman if you like it better.”
But this was only McBain’s modesty. A sailor by profession he certainly was not, although he had, as I before told you, spent a portion of his younger life at sea; but from his infancy he was used to rough it, not only on the stormy lakes of the inlands, but in open or half-decked boats all along the western shores of romantic Scotland, and that, too, in winter as well as in summer; nor was there a loch, nor cape, nor kyle he did not know every bearing of, from Handa Isle in the north, southwards as far as the Ross of Mull. And that is saying a great deal, for on that wild, indented coast, exposed as it is to the whole force of the wide Atlantic, stormy seas are met with and sudden squalls, such as are happily but little known on the shores of Merrie England.
“He is a good seaman, isn’t he?” Rory had said one day to old Ap, referring, of course, to McBain.
“Is it seamanship you talk of?” old Ap replied. “Look, you see, sir; I’d rather be in a herring boat with McBain in half a gale of wind, although he was managing the sails by himself look, you see, and steering with his teeth or knees, so to speak, than I’d be in a 200-ton schooner, with a score of dandified yachtsmen; yes, yes, indeed.”
Hearing old Ap talk thus enthusiastically about quiet, non-assuming McBain, the latter gained an ascendency in Rory’s estimation that he never after lost.