"All it proved was that neither Staunton nor his ship were ever heard of again," Ripon said calmly. "I knew Staunton well. He was a good man, a careful man—but he wasn't Crispin Gillingwater Ripon! I'm making some changes of my own in the Sky Maid; changes that should spell the difference between success and failure."
When he looked back at it later, Larry had only a hazy recollection of the rest of that evening. The rum got to him. The one thing that did stick in his mind was a snatch of song that he and Ripon had sung over and over again, pounding their glasses on the table while the other men in the dingy little barroom stared at them in good-natured derision.
"There's only a few of us left,
And we never were worth a damn,
But I'll follow my vagrant star,
That's the kind of a guy I am!
(Drink it down!)
That's the kind of a guy I am!"
Larry Gibson awoke the next morning to the sound of many hammers beating on a steel shell. There was also a sharp and comprehensive ache that started at the top of his head, which felt as though someone had been hitting him with the butt of a ray-gun, and spread all down through his body. He groaned and sat up.