of Captain Price--
his quiet, unresting watchfulness. Forty years of sun and brine had
bunched the puckers at the corners of his eyes and hardened the lines
of his big brown face; but the outstanding thing about him was still
that silent wariness, as of a man who had warning of something
impending. It went a little strangely with his figure of a massive,
steel-and-hickory shipmaster, soaked to the soul with the routine of
his calling. It seemed to give token of some faculty held in reserve,
to hint at an inner life, as it were; and not a few of the frank and
simple men who went to sea with him found it disconcerting. Captains
who could handle a big steamship as a cyclist manages a bicycle they
had seen before; they recognized in him the supreme skill, the salt-
pickled nerve, the iron endurance of a proven sailor; but there their
experience ended and the depths began.

Sooner or later, most of them went to the Burdock's chief mate for an
explanation of the unknown quality. "What makes your father act so?"
was a common form of the question. Arthur Price would smile and shake
his handsome head.

"It's not acting," he would say. "You drop off to sleep some night on
this bridge, and you'll find out what he's after. He's after you if
you don't keep your weather eye liftin'; and don't you forget it!"

In those days the Burdock had a standing charter from Cardiff to
Barcelona and back with ore to Swansea, a comfortable round trip
which brought the Captain and his son home for one week in every six.

It suited the mate's convenience excellently, for he was a man of
social habits, and he had at last succeeded in interesting Miss
Minnie Davis in his movements. She was the daughter of the Burdock's
owner, and Arthur Price's cousin in some remote degree, a plump,
clean, clever Welsh girl, of quick intelligence and pleasant good
nature. He was a tall young man, a little leggy in his way, who
filled the eye splendidly. Women said of him that he "looked every
inch a sailor"; matrons who watched his progress with Minnie Davis
considered that they would make a handsome couple. Captain Price, for
all his watchfulness, saw nothing of the affair. He approved of
Minnie, though; she was born to a share in that life in which ships
are breadwinners, and never had to be shoo'd out of the way of
hauling or hoisting gear when she came down aboard the Burdock in
dock. Her way was straight across the deck to the poop ladder and
for'ard to the