ch the head and shoulders
of Mr. Bartholomew McGuffey, chief engineer; first, second and
third assistant engineer, oiler, wiper, water-tender, and
coal-passer of the _Maggie_, appeared. He was standing on the
steel ladder that led up from his stuffy engine room and had
evidently come up, like a whale, for a breath of fresh air. "The
way you ruin them bonnets o' yourn sure is a scandal," Mr.
McGuffey concluded. "If I had a temper as nasty as yourn I'd
take soothin' syrup or somethin' for it."

Without waiting for a reply, Mr. McGuffey dropped back into his
department and Captain Scraggs, his soul filled with rage and
dire forebodings, repaired to the galley, and "candled" four
dozen eggs. Out of the four dozen he found nine with black spots
in them and carefully set them aside to be fried, sunny side up,
for Mr. Gibney and McGuffey.

CHAPTER II

Before proceeding further with this narrative, due respect for
the reader's curiosity directs that we diverge for a period
sufficient to present a brief history of the steamer _Maggie_ and
her peculiar crew. We will begin with the _Maggie_.

She had been built on Puget Sound back in the eighties, and was
one hundred and six feet over all, twenty-six feet beam and seven
feet draft. Driven by a little steeple compound engine, in the
pride of her youth she could make ten knots. However, what with
old age and boiler scale, the best she could do now was six, and
had Mr. McGuffey paid the slightest heed to the limitations
imposed upon his steam gauge by the Supervising Inspector of
Boilers at San Francisco, she would have been limited to five.
Each annual inspection threatened to be her last, and Captain
Scraggs, her sole owner, lived in perpetual fear that eventually
the day must arrive when, to save the lives of himself and his
crew, he would be forced to ship a new boiler and renew the
rotten timbers around her deadwood. She had come into Captain
Scraggs's possession at public auction conducted by the United
States Marshal, following her capture as she sneaked into San
Francisco Bay one dark night with a load of Chinamen and opium
from Ensenada. She had cost him fifteen hundred hard-earned
dollars.

Scraggs--Phineas P. Scraggs, to employ his full name, was
precisely the kind of man one might expect to own and operate the
_Maggie_. Rat-faced, snaggle toothed and furtive, with a low
cunning that sometimes passed for great intelligence, Scraggs'
character is best desc