LTHOUGH Watchett of the Battle-Axe and Ryder of the Star of the South were cousins, there was no great love lost between them, and all unprejudiced observers declared that this lack of mutual admiration was in no way due to Captain Ryder. That they remained friends at all was owing largely to his infinite good nature, and to the further fact that Mrs. Ryder pitied Mrs. Watchett.
"I wonder she goes to sea with him at all," she said. "If you were one quarter as horrid as your cousin, Will, I should never go to sea till you came ashore."
But she always went to sea with Will Ryder. It was their great delight to be together, and there were few men, married or single, who did not take a certain pleasure in seeing how fond they were of each other. He was a typical seaman of the best kind; he had a fine voice for singing and for hailing the foretopsail yard; his eyes were as blue as forget-me-nots, and his skin was as clear as the air on the Cordilleras which peeped at them over the tops of the barren hills which surround the Bay of Valparaiso. And Mrs. Ryder was just the kind of wife for a man who was somewhat inclined to take things easily. If she was as pretty as the peach, she had, like the peach, something inside which was not altogether soft. Her brown eyes could turn black—she had resolution and courage.
"You shall not put up with it," was a favourite expression on her tongue. And there were times, to use his own expression, when she made sail when he would have shortened it. In that sense she was certainly capable of "carrying on."
Both vessels were barques of about eleven hundred tons register, and if the Star of the South had about twenty tons to the good in size she was rather harder to work. It is the nature of ships to develop in certain ways, and though both of these barques were sister ships it is always certain that sisters are never quite alike. But as they belonged to the same Port of London, and were owned by two branches of the same family, all of whose money was divided up in sixty-fourths, according to the common rule with ships, they were rivals and rival beauties. But, unlike the more respectable ladies who owned them, both the vessels were fast, and it was a sore point of honour with Ryder and Watchett to prove their own the fastest.
"If she only worked a little easier, I could lick his head off," said Ryder, sadly.
But there was the rub. The Star of the South needed more "beef" on her than the Battle-Axe. She wasn't so quick in stays. By the time Ryder yelled "Let go and haul," the Battle-Axe was gathering headway on a fresh tack.
"And instead of having two more hands than we are allowed, we are two short," said his wife, bitterly. "If I were you, Will, I'd take those Greeks."
"Not by an entire jugful," replied Captain Ryder. "I remember the Lennie and the Caswell, my dear. I never knew Valparaiso so bare of men."
"And we're sailing to-morrow," said Connie Ryder, angrily; "and you've betted him a hundred pounds we shall dock before him. It's too bad. I wonder whether he'd give us another day?"