Captain Bent slowly put in eclipse his insignia. He removed his cap and rolled up the cuffs of his coat to conceal the stripes. Sociably, mariner to mariner, with convincing sympathy in tone and expression, he invited, “Go on and spin the yarn, old-timer.”
“I get ye! I ain’t talking to a coast-guarder right now! Here’s what, then—making story cable mighty short. My bills of lading show two hundred and fifty cases of canned clams, two dozen to a case, sealed, labeled proper, cases and cans; Jeth Wallace’s regular labels and stenciling—he being known as a canner who ships regular.”
“More convincing than labels and stencils must be the reputation of Captain York Coombs as a teetotal skipper,” put in Captain Bent with vigor.
The old man bounced in the chair. He shouted in his passion of innocence. He beat his fists on his breast in his apprehension that emotion might make him voiceless without these mechanics.
“That’s what the jeemro, jass-heif-ered dunkaboos reckoned on when I was chartered for this trip. They must have got to Jeth Wallace good and proper—bribed up him and his cannery, run in their rum between days and laid low while Jeth and some hand-picked whelps put the stuff up to look as in-nercent as Miss Daisy teaching a Sunday-school class. And here I’m handling the first cargo loaded off’n Dumbo, and, by the blue-gilled sculpin, till I reached off Popham Sands I was just as innercent as Miss Daisy herself.”
He had blown from his soul the hateful chaff of confession in an unbroken exhaust of breath, racing his speech before fury could again throttle him.
Captain Bent relighted his cigar, venturing no trigging comment while the old man once more charged his lungs.
“My mate, the cook and the two hands forrards, one and all, they sure have a hound’s nose for spotting rum through wood and tin. Else they had a tip. Anyways, they got into that cargo, sneaking below one after the other in relay trips, and the first I reelized any o’ their rigging was slack they was drunker’n pipcats and they didn’t know whuther they was reeling in clotheslines or handling tackle, and so the forrard hamper was slatted away and I couldn’t handle ship in the seaway and I had to work single-handed, myself, getting killicks hooked.”
“I noticed that for a shipshape, A-1 job. It was sign of an able mariner, sir.”
“I have tried hard all my life to be A-1,” mourned Captain Coombs. “But, blast it, I didn’t find others that way when I give up the sea and settled ashore. The landsharks, the gougers and the flimflammers flocked around me like gulls around a Lumbo fish house at gutting time. They have nigh dreened me, sir. I foreclosed for money I had lent on that old hooker you’re taking in tow and I refitted her as best I could. For luck and old times’ sake I renamed her the Harvest Home. It’s an awful comedown, libeled now for rum-toting, taking two honest names into court.”