That was at the bottom of all this trouble. The Skipper didn’t know best. When a series of disasters led to the Kingston being sold out of the Baltic trade, for which she was built, into the Mediterranean, then the Levant, and then the ultimate degradation of small cargo-steamers, the pilgrim trade to Jidda—when those disasters happened, the Skipper should have changed his berth. He should certainly have left her when she was sold to Abu Nakhl of Ras-el-Kasr. He didn’t know best when he fell in love with the old tub and stuck to her as she sank down the social scale of the sea to the point of trading in small and heat baked harbors in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. McGovern felt that the Skipper had made a grave mistake.
The only wisdom he was willing to concede to the Skipper just then, was what he had showed in Port Said. McGovern had hired a harbor boat there, had had himself rowed to the Kingston, mounted to the deck of the rusty little old tramp and introduced himself politely as the accepted suitor of the Skipper’s daughter Molly. The Skipper had glared at him.
“Ye ken, sir,” said McGovern anxiously, “Molly told me, sir, that she’d not marry me, sir, unless you approved.”
The Skipper turned pink, then a delicate shade of purple. A rumbling noise set up about his belt buckle. It sounded like a coming explosion. The Skipper had just fired a Greek engineer bodily off the Kingston, and the engines looked like scrap-iron. He was in no mood to be approached on sentimental topics. The rumbling rose toward speech, which would be blistering, envenomed, wrathful speech. It would probably be a bellow of rage.
“I know, sir,” said McGovern hastily and humbly, “she should make a better match. But I’m already junior engineer o’ the ——” He named his ship with modest pride. “An’ in a couple more voyages, sir——”
The rumbling had stopped short. The Skipper was regarding him ferociously. He stood up. He beckoned. And he led the way in speechless fury to the engine room of the Kingston. McGovern looked, was awed at the mess before him, and set to work while the Skipper scowled.
He had thought that a demonstration of his efficiency in his own profession might help to placate his future father-in-law. But when the Kingston left Port Said a former junior engineer on a P. & O. liner was chief and only engineer on board the Kingston, and was still in something of a daze at the transition.
He decided then that he was doing it out of love for Molly. Later he conceded that the Skipper did know what was best—in engineers. But he reflected gloomily on how far from best it had turned out to be for him, as he lay trussed up in his bunk in Ras-el-Kasr harbor.
There were excited yells and thumpings outside. Something heavy was being brought on board the Kingston. It would probably be a cannon, one of those antiquated brass affairs still venerated in the Persian Gulf, which go off sometimes when loaded, and always make a prodigious and entirely harmless din.