“Haven't you a regular barometer—an aneroid?” inquired Captain Mayo.
“I can smell all the weather I need to without bothering with one of them contrivances,” declared the master of the schooner, in lordly manner. He began to pull dirty oilskins out of a locker.
Mayo hurried up the companionway and put out his head. There were both weight and menace in the wind which hooted past his ears. The fog was gone, but the night was black, without glimmer of stars. The white crests of the waves which galloped alongside flaked the darkness with ominous signalings.
“If you can smell weather, Captain Candage, your nose ought to tell you that this promises to be something pretty nasty.”
“Oh, it might be called nasty by lubbers on a gingerbread yacht, but I have sailed the seas in my day and season, and I don't run for an inshore puddle every time the wind whickers a little.” He was fumbling with a button under his crisp roll of chin beard and gave the other man a stare of superiority.
“You don't class me with yacht-lubbers, do you?”
“Well, you was just on a yacht, wasn't you?”
“Look here, Captain Candage, you may just as well understand, now and here, that I'm one of your kind of sailors. Excuse me for personal talk, but I want to inform you that from fifteen to twenty I was a Grand-Banksman. Last season I was captain of the beam trawler Laura and Marion. And I have steamboated in the Sound and have been a first mate in the hard-pine trade in Southern waters. I have had a chance to find out more or less about weather.”
“Un-huh!” remarked the skipper, feigning indifference. “What about it?”
“I tell you that you have no business running out into this mess that is making from east'ard.”