a little." He was fumbling
with a button under his crisp roll of chin beard and gave the other man
a stare of superiority.

"You don't class me with yacht-lubbers, do you?"

"Well, you was just on a yacht, wasn't you?"

"Look here, Captain Candage, you may just as well understand, now and
here, that I'm one of your kind of sailors. Excuse me for personal
talk, but I want to inform you that from fifteen to twenty I was a
Grand-Banksman. Last season I was captain of the beam trawler _Laura and
Marion_. And I have steamboated in the Sound and have been a first mate
in the hard-pine trade in Southern waters. I have had a chance to find
out more or less about weather."

"Un-huh!" remarked the skipper, feigning indifference. "What about it?"

"I tell you that you have no business running out into this mess that is
making from east'ard."

"If you have been so much and so mighty in your time, then you
understand that a captain takes orders from nobody when he's on board
his own vessel."

"I understand perfectly well, sir. I'm not giving orders. But my own
life is worth something to me and I have a right to tell you that you
are taking foolhardy chances. And you know it, too!"

Captain Candage's gaze shifted. He was a coaster and he was naturally
cautious, as Apple-treers are obliged to be. He knew perfectly well that
he was in the presence of a man who knew! He had not the assurance to
dispute that man, though his general grudge against all the world at
that moment prompted him.

"I got out because they drove me out," he growled.

"A man can't afford to be childish when he is in command of a vessel,
sir. You are too old a skipper to deny that."

"I was so mad I didn't stop to smell weather," admitted the master,
bracing himself to meet a fresh list of the heeling _Polly_. He
evidently felt that he ought to defend his own sagacity and absolve
himself from mariner's culpability.

"Very well! Let it go at that! But what are you going to do?"

"I can't beat back to Saturday Cove against this wind--not now! She
would rack her blamed old butts out."

"Then run her for Lumbo Reach. You can quarter a following sea. She
ought to ride fairly easy."

"That's a narrow stab in a night as black as this one is."

"I'll make a cross-bearing for you. Where's your chart?" Mayo exhibited
a sailor's alert anxiety to be helpful.

"I 'ain't ever needed a chart--not for this coast."

"Then I'll have to guess at it, sir." He cl