“‘What?’ asked the Skipper. ‘You mean to mutinize on me?’
“‘Call it mutiny or what you please,’ said I, ‘but myself and Dan don’t leave this vessel again in a dory.’
“‘Don’t you know I can run into the nearest port, Newf’undland or Nova Scotia, and put you ashore?’
“‘I do.’
“‘Or take you both back to Gloucester and have you up before the court?’
“‘You can put us up before forty courts—the highest in the land, if you want—and maybe they’ll sentence us to ten years in jail, or to be strung up to a yard-arm somewheres. But I don’t cal’late they will— I don’t cal’late so—not after we tell our story. It’s a fine thing fishermen have come to when their own skippers try to lose ’em.’
“‘Lose you? Me try to lose you? And why, in God’s name, would I try to lose you?’
“‘Lord knows. But you do, and there’s an end of it. Dan and I don’t swing any dory over the rail of this vessel this trip again.’
“He said nothing to that. Only he looked at me, then a long look at Dan, and turned into his bunk again. Later in the day he drew out a quart bottle of whiskey and began to drink. That was a new thing to his crew that knew him so long. They’d pretty good reason to believe that he’d kept a bottle in his closet under lock and key for a little drink on the quiet when the dories were out and nobody by; but they knew he did it slyly so as not to have the name of it, or maybe so’s not to have to ask anybody to join him, and so save expense. But everybody knew that whatever liquor he took that way was not enough to hurt him. Yes, a sober man he’d always been—everybody had to say that for him. But now he was drinking with all hands looking on, taking it down in gulps, and when the first quart was gone he brought out another, drinking by himself all the time.
“However, he warn’t drunk by a good deal when in the middle of the night he ordered all hands on deck to make sail. The men thought he was crazy; but he was the skipper. If anything happened, ’twas his lookout, not theirs. So they gave her the full mains’l, and then he ordered the man at the wheel to swing her off.