For an hour after that Coleman could hardly be coaxed down to eat. Standing on the Celestine’s quarter, he chuckled, and chuckled, and chuckled. Even after taking his place at the table, he had to climb up the companionway to have one more look at the beaten Bonita. “A good vessel for rip-fishin’ the Portugee’s got—she drifts well,” he said, “and maybe ’tis me won’t tell him next time we meet.”
And yet in the middle of the meal he suddenly set down his mug of coffee and leaned across the table. “Don’t it strike you, Jerry, that for a vessel of her model this one is the divil for stiffness?”
“We were saying among ourselves a little while ago, Skipper, that we never before saw a vessel that barely wet her scuppers in a breeze like this.”
“That’s it— I don’t know what it is. But she’s a queer divil altogether. Sometimes when she luffs she fetches up in a way to shake every tooth in your head. And there was what one of the men that was in her last trip said of her.”
“And what did he say, Skipper?”
“He said—but come to think, he didn’t say anything, and that’s the divil of it. One or two little outs in a vessel, if you know what they are, aren’t always a great harm. But when you don’t know how to take her!”
The crew agreed with their Skipper that there was something queer about this new vessel of theirs, but no illuminating discussion came of it until next morning when, having cleared the north shoal of Georges, it became necessary to head southward.
Heading to the east’ard in a southerly breeze, she had been on the starboard tack up to that time. Now her helmsman shot her head across the wind, her sails shook, shivered, her booms began to swing, and over on the port tack went the Celestine. Everybody looked to see her roll down some, but in that breeze—they hadn’t even taken their stays’l in—nobody looked to see her do what she did. Least of all her Skipper, who, standing carelessly by the starboard rail, would have gone overboard and been lost probably, but for Jerry Connors.
“Wheel down! wheel down!” roared Jerry, and hauled the Skipper back aboard.
“Down it is!”