“Think it's a good idee,” said that ancient mariner decisively. “We've got to do somethin', and this looks like the only sensible thing.”
“Then Eri's GOT to do it!” asserted Captain Perez dogmatically. “We agreed to stick together, and two to one's a vote. Come on now, Eri, we'll match.”
“Come on, Eri!” ordered Captain Jerry. “Ain't goin' to mutiny, are you?”
“All right!” said Captain Eri, “I'll stick to the ship. Only,” he added, with a quizzical glance at his companions, “it's got to be settled that the feller that's stuck can pick his wife, and don't have to marry unless he finds one that suits him.”
The others agreed to this stipulation, and Captain Perez, drawing a long breath, took a coin from his pocket, flipped it in the air and covered it, as it fell on the table, with a big hairy hand. Captain Eri did likewise; so did Captain Jerry. Then Captain Eri lifted his hand and showed the coin beneath; it was a head. Captain Jerry's was a tail. Under Captain Perez' hand lurked the hidden fate. The Captain's lips closed in a grim line. With a desperate glance at the others he jerked his hand away.
The penny lay head uppermost. Captain Jerry was “stuck.”
Captain Eri rose, glanced at his watch, and, taking his hat from the shelf where the dishes should have been, opened the door. Before he went out, however, he turned and said:
“Perez, you and Jerry can be fixin' up the advertisement while I'm gone. You can let me see it when I come back. I say, Jerry,” he added to the “sacrifice,” who sat gazing at the pennies on the table in a sort of trance, “don't feel bad about it. Why, when you come to think of it, it's a providence it turned out that way. Me and Perez are bachelors, and we'd be jest green hands. But you're a able seaman, you know what it is to manage a wife.”
“Yes, I do,” groaned Captain Jerry lugubriously. “Durn it, that's jest it!”
Captain Eri was chuckling as, lantern in hand, he passed around the corner of the little white house on the way to the barn. He chuckled all through the harnessing of Daniel, the venerable white horse. He was still chuckling as, perched on the seat of the “truck wagon,” he rattled and shook out of the yard and turned into the sandy road that led up to the village. And an outsider, hearing these chuckles, and knowing what had gone before, might have inferred that perhaps Captain Eri did not view the “matching” and the matrimonial project with quite the deadly seriousness of the other two occupants of the house by the shore.