While he was on his tour of inspection he ran across Captain Wilmoth, coming out of the cabin. He was a very affable-looking man of middle age, with sharp blue eyes and stiff black hair liberally sprinkled with gray. In his natty blue uniform, he was Jack’s idea of a modern sea captain, and as he advanced across the deck the lad could not help admiring him.
“Well, son,” said the officer genially, “having a good look at the old tub? Like her?”
“You bet I do. She looks as if she might fight any kind of a storm.”
“Right, my boy, she can,” said the captain as he filled his pipe from a leather tobacco pouch. “The old _Blueflower_ will take any kind of a sea without a shiver. All the lighthouse tenders are fine craft. They have to be mighty stanch for they are traveling the high seas all the year round, carrying provisions to lightships and lighthouses, and seeing that everything is kept in order along Uncle Sam’s forty odd thousand miles of coast line.”
“How many tenders does the Government have in service?” queried Jack.
“I think there are about forty-six on both coasts. And you may be interested to know that they are all named after some kind of a flower, the same as battleships are named after States. There is plenty of work for them to do, too, for besides carrying the supplies, they take care of all the buoy planting. That’s tough work. In the Spring and Fall we have to gather up all the old buoys that have been in the water a long time and replace them with new ones that have been overhauled in the Portland yard. You see barnacles and other submarine growths make it necessary to take the buoys out every so often and scrape and paint them. Then of course they have to be returned to the water again. There are all kinds of buoys in the service and they all mark different types of danger points. There are whistling buoys, bell buoys, light buoys, unlighted buoys and spar buoys, and none of them is particularly easy to handle, I can assure you. Many a man has lost a leg or an arm while trying to put one of the blooming things over the side of a vessel.”
“I’d like to watch the operation some time,” said Jack.
“Well, perhaps you’ll have an opportunity to. But just now I’d forget about it and pay more attention to the cook’s bell. He’s been ding-a-linging all over the ship. Don’t you want something to eat?”