Martin waited, but not for long. It seemed to him that he had taken no more than a dozen drags of his pipe when he saw his skipper coming back. Down the hill went Martin, and after him came his skipper.
Not a word said Patsie Oddie until they were on Main Street again. Then it was only, “The stores’ll be aboard by now, don’t you think, Martin?”
“Then we’ll put out.” He threw a glance at the sky and then a look to the flag on the Custom House as they turned off Main Street to go down to the dock. At the head of the dock they met Wesley Marrs.
“Hulloh Wesley,” said Patsie. “Go on to the vessel, you, Martin, and tell them to make sail. I’ll follow on.” Then, when Martin had gone on ahead, “When’d you get in, Wesley?”
“Plenty of the one kind,” said Wesley. “Anybody that likes it no’west ought to be pleased. Tack, tack, tack, for every blessed foot of the way. All but put in to Shelburne once to give the crew a rest. Night and day, tack, tack, tack-- I cal’late the rudder post’s worn ’most out. Yes, sir. And never a let-up choppin’ ice--had to, to keep her from sinkin’ under us. Fourteen days from Fortune Bay that I’ve run in fifty-odd hours in the _Lucy_ with the wind to another quarter. Man, but I was beginnin’ to think the baby’d be grown a man afore I’d see him again. Well, I’m off, Patsie.”
“Of course--the baby and the wife. Patsie, but you ought to marry. You’ll never be half a man till you marry.”
“Oh, some nice, fine girl. Man, but there’s whole schools of girls’d jump to marry you--whole schools, man. Heave your seine and you’d get a deck-load of ’em--or a dory-load, anyway.”
“No, nor a dory-load, nor a single one caught by the gills in mistake--me that has no more learnin’ than a husky out o’ Greenland. Not me, Wesley, that can’t read my own name unless it’s wrote in plain print, and that c’n only find my way about by dead reckonin’. I c’n haul the log, and, knowin’ her course and allowin’ for tides and one thing or another that’s set down and the other things that aren’t set down, but which a man knows nat’rally----”
“Yes, Patsie, and knows it better than nineteen out o’ twenty that has sextants and quadrants, and can run them--what do they call ’em--sumner lines?”