They nearly scraped the stern wheel off a Stockton river boat, and then, as if sheering off from the blasphemy of the Stocktonites, nosed round and passed the buoy that marks the shoal water west of Hennessy’s Wharf. Then down the bay they went with the sunlight on Alcatraz and the Contre Costa shore, and away ahead the Golden Gate and a vision of the blue Pacific.
They passed Lime Point and took the middle channel, where the first heave of the outer sea striding over the bar met them with a keener touch of wind to back it. The Cliff House and Point Bonita fell astern, and now, right ahead, the Farallons sketched themselves away across the lonely blue of the sea.
The _Penguin_, bow on to the swell, was behaving admirably, so well, indeed, that Wolff, with a cigar in his mouth, had appeared on deck and climbed onto the bridge. But now, clear of the land and with a shift of helm, the beam sea produced its effect, and her rolling capacities became evident.
Wolff descended, leaving the bridge to its lawful occupants, and even Shiner, who had taken his place on the after gratings with an account book and stylograph pen, retired after a very little while.
The _Penguin_ was built to hold a thousand miles of cable in her fore end and after tanks, and, loaded like that, the effect of her top-hamper in the way of picking-up gear, picking-up engine, derricks, and buoys would be corrected. But she had no cable in her now, only water ballast, and she rolled after her natural bent, and rolled and rolled till cries of “Steward!” came faintly through the saloon hatch, followed by other sounds and the clinking of basins.
Blood walked the bridge with Harman, casting now and then an eye at the compass card and the fellow at the wheel, and now and then an eye at the forward deck lumbered with the gear and four or five new-painted buoys, each numbered and each with a lamp socket.
“They haven’t spared expense in fitting her out,” said Harman.
“No, they haven’t,” replied the Captain. “And why? Simply because I’ve been at Shiner all the past week with a rope’s end, so to say. I’m blessed if the blighter didn’t want to economise on buoys! ‘Two will be enough,’ says he; ‘it’s only a short job we are on, and they are three hundred dollars apiece.’ He said that right to my face. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘it’s none of my business, but if you want to drop the job, whatever it is, in the middle, and run a thousand miles to the nearest port for a ten-cent buoy, you’ll find your economy has been misplaced. You will that.’ So he caved in on the buoys. Then we had an argument over the grapnel rope. He wanted to take two miles of all hemp. I wanted five miles of wire wove. I got it, but only after a mighty tough struggle. The grapnels are good, but they went with the ship, and they’d been properly laid up in paraffin; not a speck on them. Then the Kelvin sounder was out of order. Yes, they’d have sailed with it like that only for me, and it cost them something to have it put right.”