"It is here, in the old brown wallet, next my heart, where thou dwellest, my Flora. Our money is soon on the old _Wasdale_. God keep you!"
The biting wind of early March fairly whipped the captain up the side of the liner lying, with shortened cable, mid-stream in the Mersey. Clutching a stiff hat with one hand, baggy trousers fluttering, the tails of his frieze ulster tripping him, it was an odd and ungainly figure of a man that gained the deck and lumbered forward. A quartermaster near the gangway grinned when the pot-hat bounced from the bristling red head and carromed merrily off the deck-house, but a glance from the tail of Captain Arendt's eye froze the mahogany countenance of the offender into instant solemnity. It was a hint that the master of the ship was coming into his own. A few moments later he emerged from his quarters transformed. The smartly setting uniform of blue and the flat cap jammed down hard were so evidently what he belonged in, that the shore-going clothes had been like a clumsy disguise. A small boy flattened himself against the rail and saluted with immense dignity. The captain pinched him with a hairy paw and chuckled:
"Hello, Moses, or vas it Josephs I calls you last woyage? Holy Schmokes! If you keep my room no better dis woyage, I bites your head off close to your neck. You hear? Scoo-o-t."
"Moses-Josephs" fled, and Captain Arendt turned on his heel to go back to his room, remembering with a start that he had not placed the precious wallet in his safe, but had transferred it to his blouse. He clapped his hand to the breast pocket, hove an explosive sigh of relief when he found it there, and was instantly bent on banishing all chance of loss, when the chief engineer popped up from below and sought him out in breathless haste with these tidings:
"Sorry to trouble you, sir, but a drunken dock-rat of a Liverpool fireman refuses to go on watch, and he's reinforced the argument with a slice-bar, and laid out two of my oilers and a stoker, and I need more help to get him in irons. He's raising hell, and no mistake, sir."
The captain was halfway down the ladder before the chief had done speaking, and despite the bigness of him, made his way to the fire-room like a squirrel. The pallid, sodden mutineer, backed into a corner, was swinging the iron bar in empty circles, fighting the dancing shadows from an open furnace door, cursing and muttering. His bleary vision had no time to focus on the big man with the red face and snapping blue eye, who ducked under the weapon, smashed him in the face with one hand, squeezed his neck in the other, and flung him against a bunker door with such force that he lay as he fell, a dirty, huddled heap.