"What are you?" "Merchant captain, sir," said the stout man, turning on the questioner a clear, light blue eye that shone with health and evident courage.
"Are you in a situation?"
"My vessel's laid up, sir, and I'm waiting to take her again."
"I'm not impertinent, but tell me your wages."
"Ten pound a month, and good enough too, these bad times."
"Then if you'll superintend the building of a vessel for me, I'll give you £150 a year—or at that rate, and you shall have a smaller vessel afterwards, if you care to sail a mere smack."
And so the bargain was struck, and Captain Powys was employed as bulldog, a special clause being inserted in the contract to that effect.
"Men won't like it," said the builder. "They'll lead him a life."
"Tell them, if they do, you lose your contract and they lose their work." So the splendid little steamer grew apace; she was composite, and Cassall took care that she should be strong. The most celebrated living designer of yachts had offered to make the drawings for nothing, out of mere fondness for Cassall, but the old gentleman paid his heavy fee. If any one can design a good and safe vessel it is the yacht-builder, whose little thirty tonners are expected to run quite securely across the Bay in the wild autumn. The Robert Cassall had not a nail or bolt in her that was not scrutinized by a stern critic. "Never mind fancy work or fancy speed. Give me perfect collision bulk-heads; perfect watertight compartments; make her unsinkable, and I don't care if you only make her travel ten knots—that's good enough for the North Sea."
Powys asked and obtained an assistant to take a turn on the day or night shifts, and the British workmen were held hard in hand by two acute and most critical mariners.