The wind was clean and steady, and Cavarly kept the Octarara close reefed, at half her speed; she crept down the coast with little shift of sail day or night, and on the 20th passed some fifteen miles to seaward of Delaware Bay. Except for Simpson drilling and roughing, it was an idle enough crew.
I was not so ignorant of sailing—what with knocking about wharves and handling catboats on the river—as not to know that Cavarly was purposely taking his time; and if I had been, the talk in the forecastle would have set me thinking, though for that matter. I did not know that the forecastle always criticizes the cabin, as one of the rights of labour. I did not think much of Simpson's opinion, through simple dislike, beginning things with such general misjudgment of men as maybe is the case with most; but Simpson was not alone in thinking the conduct of the cabin peculiar.
After the morning drill exercise on the 20th there were more black-clay pipes going around the small safety stove in the forecastle than could be counted in the smoke. A dingy place, the forecastle, at best, but one that a man may grow to like well enough, if not over-squeamish. Simpson was there, and Gerry, and the bos'en, Hames, and an Irishman named Tobin, whose hair was red and thin.
“Will we get there, do ye think, Jimmie Hames?” said Tobin.
“Where?”
“Aw, beyant. Will it be while we're still young?”
“It ain't that we won't git there,” said Hames slowly. “It's why the ol' man don't want to git there soon as he kin. He don't, an' that's straight. Here's Gerry now, that comed with him from Baltimore. I asks him now, why don't he?”
Gerry puffed deliberately.
“Why,” he said at last, “I come f'om Baltimore. I don't deny it, do I? But if you asks, why don't he? I says, I reckon he has sec'et orders. But, I says, he never showed 'em to me. An',” he went on with ponderous scorn, “the Sec'etary o' the Navy come f'om Connecticut, same as you. Wha'd he tell you them see'et orders was, when you took dinner with him an' was int'oduced to three rear admirals?”
“Orders!” growled Simpson. “That's all right. He can hitch his hawser to a porpoise, if he's ordered. What's my business? That ain't. But what does the Government do next? Why they commissions the porpoise. Course, they do. It's politics. Makes volunteer naval officers as don't know a shell from a round shot till it busts in their ear. An' that ain't my business either. Oh, no!”