“Think the old man would call for help? Not much. If he did, his owners would have jumped him for costing them salvage money! That’s another reason so many ships sink and are burned,” he added in parenthesis.
“Well, sir, that old fire went from bad to worse. The crew had to berth aft and the decks,—she was a steel ship,—began to get so hot that you had to walk pussy-footed on ’em. But still the old man wouldn’t quit.
“‘If we only get a wind,’ he says, ‘I’ll bring her into port even if she busts up when we tie to the dock.’
“‘If you get a wind,’ says I, ‘you won’t have to wait fer that. She’ll go skyrocketing without any by your leave or thank you.’
“‘Pshaw, Brown, you’re nervous!’ says he.
“‘Of course I am,’ says I; ‘who wouldn’t be, going to sea with a bloomin’ stove full of red-hot coals under their boots, instead of a good wholesome ship? Keel-haul me if ever I sail again with coal,’ says I.
“Things goes along this way for about two weeks, and then comes the grand bust-up. We couldn’t eat, we couldn’t sleep, we could hardly breathe.
“‘Get out the boats,’ says the old man at last, as if he’d made up his mind that it was really time to get away.
“Well, sir, to see the way those bullies jumped for the boats you’d have thought there was pocket money in every one of ’em, or a prize put up by the old man to see who’d be overboard first.
“We got away, all right, the skipper last, of course. But he had to go below to save his pet parrot. He’d just about reached the deck, when—confusion!—up she goes.
“The whole blows up sky high and the skipper with it. One of the men said he had stopped to light his pipe, and the flame of the match touched off all that gas. But I dunno just how that might be. Anyhow, for quite a while we could see that old skipper sailing up to heaven,—’twas the only way he’d ever get there, I heard one of the men say. Then down he comes, kerplunk!
“It was a hard job for us in the boat to reckernize him. You see, he’d had a fine, full beard when he went up, but he come down clean shaved! And the parrot,—well, sir, that parrot looked like a ship without a rudder. Its gum-gasted tail had followed the skipper’s whiskers into oblivion,—as Shakespeare says. Well, we got him into the boat, and two days after we were picked up, but neither the skipper nor the parrot were ever the same man or the same bird again.”