Arthur Valentine left the saloon fairly well pleased with himself, but inwardly recording one objection:
"He's pretty well muzzled, but I wrote him to cut out all his religious palaver in public, and I won't stand for any more of this nonsense of playing the martyr. That goes."
While idling forward after lunch, he met the first-officer coming off watch. Mischievous fortune thus brought together a young man with an axe to grind and a soured elder with a grievance.
"So the captain is ready to stay ashore," observed Valentine after a few greeting commonplaces. "Did you hear his queer speech this morning? I wonder what he was driving at? A passenger can't help being curious to know."
Mr. Parlin was a ripe and ruddy picture of a mariner, passing as heartily frank of speech except among those who knew him well. A lurking notion that he had seen this young man in New York was somehow coupled in his mind with the company's head offices, where an errand had called him before leaving that port. As he studied the passenger before replying, his glance was drawn to the gun-metal cigarette case, casually produced, whose face bore in gold outline the initials "A. H. V." Mr. Parlin was not dull witted. These letters stood for the name of the "old man's son."
The first-officer became inwardly alert as he said: "Well, Captain Kendrick is getting old, and he hasn't been right since he was smashed up so bad three years ago."
"Got washed into the scuppers of the _Juanita_. They found him jammed under a boat with his timbers busted to smithereens. You may have noticed that he walks with a list to port."
"He didn't break his head, did he?" and Valentine tapped his forehead with a significant finger.
"Well, that's not for me to say," and Mr. Parlin hesitated, with a flutter of an eyelid; "but he has his hobby, and he sets all the sail it'll carry. You may have noticed it this morning. But he was going it very easy then."
"I'd have had my ship long before this," continued Mr. Parlin, "if the old man hadn't put a black mark on my record in the main office. Now that he talks of going out of the line, there's no harm in my sayin' that if I'd flopped on my knees and spouted psalms instead of sticking to my duties, it would be Captain Parlin by now. Excuse me. I have some work on."