I found the skipper leaning against the weather rigging and watching a red light coming up on us. Noticing me he said, “There’s that porgy steamer that we beat out for that school the other day overhauling us now. There’s the beauty of steam. The crew of this one knows more in a minute than they know in a week about fishing in that steamer, and we’d be carrying our summer kites when that gang, if they were in a sailing vessel, would be laying to an anchor; and with our boat out and their boat out and a school in sight they’d have to take our leavings. But here’s one of the times when they have the best of it.”
There wasn’t much wind stirring then, but it promised to breeze up, or so the skipper thought, and I’m sure I was glad to hear him say it, for the harder it blew the sooner we would get to New York and the better our chance to beat the porgyman. First in to market got the cream.
It was pretty well on to daybreak when the porgy steamer got up abreast of us and after a while worked by. One of them took the trouble to sing out to us when they went by, “Well, you got a school before us, but we’ll be tied up and into the dock and spending our money ashore whilst you’re still along the Jersey coast somewhere.”
And we supposed they would, but Hurd, who was then to our wheel, had to call back to them, “Oh, I dunno. I dunno about that––it’s a good run to Fulton Market dock yet.” And, turning to us, “I hope the bloody old boiler explodes so nobody’ll be able to find a mackerel of ’em this side the Bay of Fundy. Of course I wouldn’t want to see the men come to any harm, but wouldn’t it jar you––them scrubs?”
The skipper wasn’t saying anything. And it meant a lot to him, too. He was looking after the steamer and, I know, praying for wind. We could see it in his eyes.
And sometimes things come as we like to have them. At full dawn it was a nice breeze with the Johnnie Duncan washing her face in plenty of good spray and the fine sun shining warm on a fresh sea-way. Another hour, the wind hauling and still making, the Johnnie was down to her rail, and awhile after that she was getting all the wind she needed.
“We may have a chance to try her out on this run, who knows?” said the skipper. We were coming up on the porgy steamer then and you should have seen his eyes when they looked from the rail to the deck of his vessel and from the deck again to aloft. On the steamer the gang were in the waist watching us coming and they must have been piling the coal into her below and giving her the jet steadily, for out of her funnel was coming the smoke in clouds mixed with steam.
“But their firemen can stoke till they’re black in the face and they won’t get more than eleven or eleven and a half knots out of her,” said Clancy. “I know her––the Nautilus––and if this one under us ain’t logging her fourteen good then I don’t know. And she’ll be doing better yet before we see New York.”