“Guess I’ll have to.  But the offscourings of the city docks!  They will be worse than these Portygees.”

It was not a prospect he welcomed.  He well knew the sort of dock rats he must put up with if he wished to make up his crew with city hands for a short trip.  The sea tramps who are within reach of coasting skippers are the same kind of worthless material that shiftless farmers must depend upon in harvest time.

Even the lack of one man forward, to say nothing of the cook’s boy, made a considerable difference in the working of the schooner.  ’Rion Latham loudly proclaimed that he was being imposed upon when he was forced to work with the captain’s watch.  He had shipped as supercargo and clerk, he had!  This treatment was an imposition.

“You know what you can do about it, ’Rion, if you like,” the skipper said to him calmly, but aside.  “I wouldn’t want to feel that I was holding you to a job that you did not like.  You can leave the Seamew any time you want.”

“Huh!  The rats will be doing that soon enough,” growled ’Rion.

But he did not say this where Captain Latham could hear.  It was Horry Newbegin who heard him.

“It strikes me, young feller, that if I quarreled with my victuals and drink the way you do, I’d get me another berth and get shet of all this.”  And the old salt wagged his head.  “I don’t get you at all, ’Rion.”

“You wait,” growled the younger man.  “I’ll leave at the right time.  And if things go as I expect, everybody else will leave him flat, too.”

“You’re taking a chance talking that way,” admonished the old man.  “It’s just as much mutiny as though you turned and hit the skipper or the mate.”

“It is, is it?  I’ll show him!”

“Show who?” asked Horry, in some wonder at the other’s spitefulness.

“That dratted cousin of mine.  Thinks he owns the earth and sea, as well as this hoodooed tub of a schooner.  Gets the best of everything.  But he won’t always.  He never ought to have got the money to buy this old tub.”

“You said you wouldn’t have her for a gift,” chuckled the old man.

“But that don’t make it any the more right that he should have her.  And she is hoodooed.  You know she is, Horry.”

The old mariner was silent.  ’Rion craftily went on: 

“Look what a number of things have happened since he put this derned schooner into commission.  We broke an anchor chain in Paulmouth Harbor, didn’t we?  And the old mud hook lies there to this day.  Did you ever see so many halyards snap in your life, and in just a capful of wind?  Didn’t we have a tops’l carried away—­clean—­in that squall off Swampscott?  And now the hands are leaving her.”

“Guess you know something about that,” growled Horry.

’Rion grinned.

“Maybe I do.  I don’t say ‘no’ and I don’t say ‘yes.’  However, we’ve all got to work like dogs to make up for being short-handed.”