"Moses-Josephs" fled, and Captain Arendt turned on his heel to go back to his room, remembering with a start that he had not placed the precious wallet in his safe, but had transferred it to his blouse. He clapped his hand to the breast pocket, hove an explosive sigh of relief when he found it there, and was instantly bent on banishing all chance of loss, when the chief engineer popped up from below and sought him out in breathless haste with these tidings:
"Sorry to trouble you, sir, but a drunken dock-rat of a Liverpool fireman refuses to go on watch, and he's reinforced the argument with a slice-bar, and laid out two of my oilers and a stoker, and I need more help to get him in irons. He's raising hell, and no mistake, sir."
The captain was halfway down the ladder before the chief had done speaking, and despite the bigness of him, made his way to the fire-room like a squirrel. The pallid, sodden mutineer, backed into a corner, was swinging the iron bar in empty circles, fighting the dancing shadows from an open furnace door, cursing and muttering. His bleary vision had no time to focus on the big man with the red face and snapping blue eye, who ducked under the weapon, smashed him in the face with one hand, squeezed his neck in the other, and flung him against a bunker door with such force that he lay as he fell, a dirty, huddled heap.
"Vash him off on deck, and put him in the hospital," said the captain. "He's a goot man ven sober. He vas vit me in anudder ship once. I knows him. Only his ribs is cracked, I t'ink."
When the five thousand ton Wasdale began to crawl down the Mersey, a hundred emigrants clustered along the after-rail, and shivered as they chattered. Two score cabin passengers walked the saloon deck amidships, and watched the great gray docks slip past. Twilight brooded over the Irish Sea and the filmy Welsh coast when dinner called them to make swift acquaintance, from which the ponderous good humor of the captain was missing. He dined alone in his room, and hastily, because he preferred to keep close to the bridge in these jostling waters. Yet the night had become almost windless, and so clear that the twin lanterns of the light-ship off Carnarvon Bay gleamed like jewels on a canopy of black velvet. Captain Arendt leaned on the rail at the end of the bridge, and sniffed the sparkling air as the evening wore late.
"It looks goot," he muttered; "but I schmell fog. Yes, I schmell fog, and the rail is schticky, and the paint is schticky, and dere will be fog before morning."
He rubbed a massive shoulder and turned to the chief officer:
"And my rheumatism tells me dere vill be wet fog. I am coldt, and vill change my coat. I am also an old fool; but tell the engine-room to stand by for fog, not before morning, but before midnight, by Chiminy! I schmelled it strong dot time, and I never schmelled him wrong."
"Moses-Josephs" was caught in the act of brushing and laying away the captain's shore togs with absorbed attention to detail.
"Choke dot vistlin' noise off, and run avay," was the order that sent the boy scurrying toward the door. "Vait, I tells you," halted him as if he had fetched up against a wall. "How is your mudder, boy? She was pretty sick last voyage, you tells me. Better? Dot is fine. When we come again to Liverpool, if you are a goot boy, you can lay off one trip mit wages, and help her get well. Now scoo-o-t. I don't want you around. You is a tamned nuisance."