By that you will understand we were walking away from our yacht. We were to anchor in the 158 harbor while she was still coming, and we had towed our seine-boat all the way.
“Lord,” said Clancy, as we were tying up our foresail, “but I’d like to see this one in an ocean race with plenty of wind stirring––not a flat breeze and a short drag like we had to-day.”
XIX
MINNIE ARKELL AGAIN
Coming on to dark that night a gig put off from the schooner-yacht and rowed over to us. On the way she was hailed and passed a few words with a steam-yacht anchored in between. The man in the stern of the gig was not satisfied until he had been rowed three times around the Johnnie. When he had looked his fill he came alongside.
He mistook Clancy for the skipper. I suppose he couldn’t imagine a man of Clancy’s figure and bearing to be an ordinary hand on a fisherman. So to Clancy he said, “Captain, you’ve got a wonderful vessel here. Put a single stick in her and she’ll beat the world.”
“Yes,” said Clancy, “and she’d be a hell of a fine fisherman then, wouldn’t she?”
The rest of us had to roar at that. We at once pictured the Johnnie rigged up as a sloop out on the Grand Banks, trawling or hand-lining, with the crew trying to handle her in some of the winter gales that struck in there. And a great chance 160 she would have rigged as a sloop and her one big sail, making a winter passage home eight or nine or ten hundred miles, when as it was, with the sail split up to schooner rig, men found it bad enough.