“I say, Noah,” he called. “Some flood, eh? Located Ararat yet?”
“Catch any fish?” bawled another youngster down over the rail.
“Gracious! Look at the beer! Good English beer! Put me down for a case!”
Never was a more popular wrecked crew more merrily rescued at sea. The young blades would have it that none other than old Noah himself had come on board with the remnants of the Lost Tribes, and to elderly female passengers spun hair-raising accounts of the sinking of an entire tropic island by volcanic and earthquake action.
“I’m a steward,” Dag Daughtry told the Mariposa’s captain, “and I’ll be glad and grateful to berth along with your stewards in the glory-hole. Big John there’s a sailorman, an’ the fo’c’s’le ’ll do him. The Chink is a ship’s cook, and the nigger belongs to me. But Mr. Greenleaf, sir, is a gentleman, and the best of cabin fare and staterooms’ll be none too good for him, sir.”
And when the news went around that these were part of the survivors of the three-masted schooner, Mary Turner, smashed into kindling wood and sunk by a whale, the elderly females no more believed than had they the yarn of the sunken island.
“Captain Hayward,” one of them demanded of the steamer’s skipper, “could a whale sink the Mariposa?”
“She has never been so sunk,” was his reply.
“I knew it!” she declared emphatically. “It’s not the way of ships to go around being sunk by whales, is it, captain?”
“No, madam, I assure you it is not,” was his response. “Nevertheless, all the five men insist upon it.”