t any dunnage laying around anywhere?"

"No, sir."

"Well, then, I guess you're a regular sailor, all right, the way the
breed runs nowadays. That sounds perfectly natural." The captain led the
way down to a public landing, where a power-yawl, with engineer and a
mate, was in waiting. "Will she go into the stream to-night, Mr. Dodge?"
asked Captain Downs, curtly.

"No, sir! About four hundred tons still to come."

Schooner captains keep religiously away from their vessels as long as
the crafts lie at the coal-docks.

"Come up for me in the morning as soon as she is in the stream. Here's
a man to fill the crew. If that coon shows up with another man kick the
two of 'em up the wharf."

"Will the passenger come aboard with you, sir?"

"He called me up at the hotel about supper-time and said something about
wanting to come aboard at the dock. I tried to tell him it was foolish,
but it's safe to reckon that a man who wants to sail as passenger from
here to Boston on a coal-schooner is a fool, anyway. If he shows up,
let him come aboard." Captain Downs swung away and the night closed in
behind him.

Mayo took his place in the yawl and preserved meek and proper silence
during the trip down the harbor.

When they swung under the counter of the schooner which was their
destination, the young man noted that she was the _Drusilla M. Alden_,
a five-master, of no very enviable record along the coast, so far as the
methods and manners of her master went; Mayo had heard of her master,
whose nickname was "Old Mull." He had not recognized him under the name
of Captain Downs when the runner had addressed him.

The new member of the crew followed the mate up the ladder--only a few
steps, for the huge schooner, with most of her cargo aboard, showed less
than ten feet of freeboard amidships.

"Sleepy, George?" asked the mate, when they were on deck.

"No, sir."

"Then you may as well go on this watch."

"Yass'r!"

"We'll call it now eight bells, midnight. You'll go off watch eight
bells, morning."

Mayo knew that the hour was not much later than eleven, but he did
not protest; he knew something about the procedure aboard coastwise
coal-schooners.

Search-lights bent steady glare upon the chutes down which rushed the
streams of coal, black dust swirling in the white radiance. The great
pockets at Lambert Point are never idle. High above, on the railway,
trains of coal-cars racketed. Under his feet the fabric of the ves