Captain Bert was silent a moment. It did seem logical. But the widow—she was so tormented scrupulous. Being honest, doing nobody wrong—that was about all he heard when he took frequent suppers and Sunday dinners with her. He had even dreamed that some day, if the packet business held good, he would make those meals permanent fixtures in his life by marrying the widow.
"Those old barrels in the hold—they're some the Mary's owner-to-be asked me to fetch him," continued Bill. "There's a lot of dunnage in there with them. Lord, the Mary's a regular floating junk shop!"
"She always was," drily commented the captain. "Leaks, rolls, and the deck is so rotten in places you'd go through if you stepped out a hornpipe. Any man who can sell her ought to be Secretary of the Navy."
It was nine o'clock when the Mary Chilton cast off and headed under full sail down the harbor toward Cape Cod Bay. There was no moon, and a thin fog blew over the water in a fair June breeze. Captain Blackmer stood aft at the wheel. Bill was puttering around, first in the foc'sle, then in the hold.
The southwesterly breeze began to pick up off-shore. Dead ahead in the fog veil loomed the six schooners. Salt water politics! Captain Bert recollected that he had played them before. There was the time, when he was an A. B., that the old bark Shannon Magec rammed the Dutch brig off the Brazilian coast, and he and the rest of the crew looted her cargo. He had never told Widow Barnes about that. Then, too, there were other things he had never told her—but what she didn't know wouldn't harm her.
Bill came up from the hold. He peered off through the fog toward the Crosby fleet.
"Lordy!" he exclaimed, coming aft toward the captain. "If we'd moored them ourselves we couldn't have placed them better for disposing of 'em. Look at 'em! Less than eight fathoms between 'em. Now ain't that just like a fool tugboat skipper and a company of greenhorns!"
Captain Bert bit his lip. Was he a coward? He—guided by the silly sentiments of a woman, a woman who had never gone to sea, who didn't own a packet that was to be run out of business; a woman who had bought shares in that damned Crosby fleet.
Bill had gone back to the hold. The captain hated to think of having to give up the packet and of losing his genial new shipmate. He recalled the former mates whom he had shipped on his two schooners. He thought of how this new one had taken hold, his ability as a navigator, his reliability as a companion. Bill had suggested striking at the Crosby fleet largely to safeguard his own job. But in so doing also to stabilize the captain's packet business. And if the widow were deprived of the money she had invested in the Crosby Company, it would make her all the more willing to be his wife—when he was ready to ask her.