had led of late to nothing better than these dark threats
of dismissal; and a threat of dismissal would check him at once into a
hesitating silence as though he were not sure that the proper time for
defying it had come. On this occasion he seemed to have lost his tongue
for a moment, and Massy, getting in motion, heavily passed him by with
an abortive attempt at shouldering. Sterne defeated it by stepping
aside. He turned then swiftly, opening his mouth very wide as if to
shout something after the engineer, but seemed to think better of it.

Always--as he was ready to confess--on the lookout for an opening to
get on, it had become an instinct with him to watch the conduct of his
immediate superiors for something "that one could lay hold of." It was
his belief that no skipper in the world would keep his command for a
day if only the owners could be "made to know." This romantic and
naive theory had led him into trouble more than once, but he remained
incorrigible; and his character was so instinctively disloyal that
whenever he joined a ship the intention of ousting his commander out
of the berth and taking his place was always present at the back of his
head, as a matter of course. It filled the leisure of his waking hours
with the reveries of careful plans and compromising discoveries--the
dreams of his sleep with images of lucky turns and favorable accidents.
Skippers had been known to sicken and die at sea, than which nothing
could be better to give a smart mate a chance of showing what he's made
of. They also would tumble overboard sometimes: he had heard of one or
two such cases. Others again . . . But, as it were constitutionally,
he was faithful to the belief that the conduct of no single one of them
would stand the test of careful watching by a man who "knew what's what"
and who kept his eyes "skinned pretty well" all the time.

After he had gained a permanent footing on board the Sofala he allowed
his perennial hope to rise high. To begin with, it was a great advantage
to have an old man for captain: the sort of man besides who in the
nature of things was likely to give up the job before long from one
cause or another. Sterne was greatly chagrined, however, to notice that
he did not seem anyway near being past his work yet. Still, these
old men go to pieces all at once sometimes. Then there was the
owner-engineer close at hand to be impressed by his zeal and steadiness.
Sterne never for a moment doubted the o