“And leaky boots is the devil,” affirmed another—a notorious talker this one, who bunked up in the peak, where he could be dimly seen now, his head out of his bunk that his voice might carry the better. “I bought a pair of boots in Boston once—a Jew up on Atlantic Avenue——”
“In Heaven’s name, will you shut up, you and your Atlantic Avenue boots? We’ll never hear the end of those boots.”
The man in the peak subsided, and he who had quelled him, near to the stove and smoking a pipe, went on for himself: “And what were you thinkin’ of, Martin, when you thought you were goin’?”
“Or did you think any time that you was goin’?” asked somebody else.
“Indeed and I did, and a dozen times I thought it—and that ’twas a blessed cold kind of a day for a man to be soaking his feet in the ocean.”
“And yet”—the lad in the peak was in commission again—“and yet warn’t it some professor said in that book that somebody was reading out of the other day—warn’t it him said that salt water ain’t nigh so cold as fresh. Is it, Martin?”
“As to that,” answered Martin, “I dunno. But I wish ’twas that professor’s feet, not mine, was astraddle the bottom of that dory—not to wish him any harm. But winter’s day and the wind no’therly, I found it cold enough.”
“I went into a Turkish bath parlor in New York one time,” came the conversational voice from the peak, “and hot? My Lord——”
“The man,” said the next on watch, taking his mitts from the line above the stove—“the man that’d talk about hot Turkish baths on a night like this to sea— Turkish baths, and, Lord in heaven, two good long hours up there——” He halted to take a sniff up the companion-way. “Two hours—what ought to be done with the like o’ him?”
The man by the stove, who a while before had vanquished the lad in the peak, took his pipe long enough from his mouth to observe, “And for four years now, to my knowledge, he’s been tryin’ to tell how hot ’twas in that Turkish bath.”