“How did you dare to do such a thing to me—those gentlemen looking on? Father, have you lost your mind?”
Otie expressed the opinion tinder his breath that the captain, on the contrary, had “lost his number.”
Otie's superior officer was stamping around the quarterdeck, kicking at loose objects, and avoiding his daughter's resentful gaze. There was a note of insincerity in his bluster, as if he wanted to hide embarrassment in a cloud of his own vaporings, as a squid colors water when it fears capture.
“After this you call me Cap'n Candage,” he commanded. “After this I'm Cap'n Candage on the high seas, and I propose to run my own quarter-deck. And when I let a crowd of dudes traipse on board here to peek and spy and grin and flirt with you, you'll have clamshells for finger-nails. Now, my lady, I don't want any back talk!”
“But I am going to talk to you, father!”
“Remember that I'm a Candage, and back talk—”
“So am I a Candage—and I have just been ashamed of it!”
“I'm going to have discipline on my own quarterdeck.”
“Back talk, quarter-deck discipline, calling you captain! Fol-de-rol and fiddlesticks! I'm your own daughter and you're my father. And you have brought us both to shame! There! I don't want to stay on this old hulk, and I'm not going to stay. I am going home to Aunt Zilpah.”
“I had made up my mind to let you go. My temper was mild and sweet till those jeehoofered, gold-trimmed sons of a striped—”