"But is his name really Calamity?" asked the girl.
"Meybe it is and meybe it isna," answered McPhulach cautiously. "Some say he's a mon o' guid family, and others declare the revairse is the truth; but which is right I dinna ken."
"Well, I've never sailed with him before," put in Smith, "but from the little I've see'd of his gentle habits I should say he'd die of throat trouble all of a sudden."
"Throat trouble?" queried the girl.
"Yes; the throat trouble that comes of wearin' a rope collar too tight. Why, we'd only been out a few days when he starts to half murder the whole bloomin' crew. A roarin', ravin', rampin' lunatic he was," and Smith proceeded to relate, in pungent, picturesque language, the manner in which Calamity had quelled the mutiny single-handed.
"I wish I'd been here to see it," murmured the girl almost fervently, while a light leapt to her grey eyes which made Smith think of firelight seen through a closed window in winter time.
"Blimey! I don't admire your taste, Miss," he ejaculated. "The decks were like a blood—yes, they were—like a bloody slaughter-house. There's no other way of puttin' it."
"At any rate, he's a man," retorted Miss Fletcher with a queer note of defiance in her voice, "and I admire him for it."
Smith gazed at her for a moment in utter perplexity. He had confidently expected that, after the way in which the Captain had treated her, the girl would be only too ready to accept anything that could be said to his disadvantage. Yet she was actually expressing admiration for him and his bloodthirsty methods! Her attitude not only amazed him, but struck him as being shockingly unfeminine. As a woman she ought to have expressed the strongest disgust at the skipper's brutality, and not gloried in it.
"Lummy! You're a queer'n and no error," he murmured.