“What I wants is advice. Shall I lay a course back to the Brazils and cross the hawse of some shaved-headed priest, or put into the river Plate and have her own kind of sky-pilot do the job? She lays she won’t have no shave-head splice her, and it’s a good three weeks’ run to the river, to say nothing of the danger of the Pompero this time o’ year. Ain’t there any way to make her ’bout ship an’ head her on the right tack, or have I got to be slanting about this d—d ocean until I get to be an old man?”
“What wud ye loike us to do?” asked O’Hara.
“Do!” roared Breeze. “If I knew, do you suppose I’d ask you? I’d make you do it so infernal quick you——”
“Or whang yer lights out, ye insolent man,” said McCloud, turning upon him.
“Well, well, I’m no priest,” said the repentant O’Hara.
“No more ye ken, Mickey, me boy; na is it the likes o’ you as will be o’ service in this case. Now, ye know, Mickey, I knows law, and I always have told ye the skipper of a vessel is a law to himself. Ain’t that be the truth, sir?” he asked, turning to the captain.
Captain Breeze nodded.
“That being the case, I know a skipper can marry people, perform religious worship, and do all manner o’ things aboard ships off soundings, as the saying is.”
The skipper nodded encouragingly from the safe.
“That being the case,” says I, “there’s no reason or being or state as can keep him fra marrying this minute if—if he wants to.”