The company of the Laura was small and undistinguished. The captain was a Nova Scotian, big and red, who had, once upon a time, skippered a full-rigged ship, and who still sighed at the memory of it as he looked along the narrow, dirty decks of his present craft. The mate was a New Yorker, with a master's certificate and a head full of stories of the prowess of the American Navy. The chief engineer had once been a good man in his profession, but the whiskey of his mother country had surely and slowly brought him down to his present berth. The half-dozen passengers were of little interest to Hemming, and the days dragged for him, sickening with memories. In self-defence he reverted to fiction, and even attempted verse.
One morning, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Laura was signalled by an open boat with a rubber blanket for sail. The engines slowed. Hemming was on the bridge at the time, and turned the captain's glass upon the little craft.
"What do you make of it, sir?" inquired the skipper, from the door of the tiny chart-room below.
"She looks like a ship's boat," replied Hemming. "The sail is rigged square, with a boat-hook and an oar for yards, and has a hole in the middle; it's a poncho, I think. There's a nigger forward, waving a shirt, and a white man aft, smoking."
The captain hurried up to the bridge and took the glass. After aiming it at the bobbing stranger, he turned to Hemming.
"My boat," he said, "and the same damn fool aboard her."
"Your boat?" inquired Hemming.
The mariner glared, with angry eyes, across the glinting water. Suddenly his face cleared. "I win," he cried. "I bet him ten dollars he'd have to get out inside six weeks, and by cracky, so he has!"
"Who is he?" asked the Englishman.
"He's Mr. O'Rourke, the man who's lookin' for trouble," replied the big Nova Scotian.