d sank with
all hands, inside of a minute."

"Rot!" replied the practical sailor. "The 'Laviny' had collision
bulkheads, and couldn't have sunk in no sich time, ef she could at all.
'Sides Cap'n Phinney ain't no man to run down a berg in clear day, nor
yet in the night, nor no other time. He's been on this coast and the
Labrador run too long fur any sich foolishness. No, son, ef the
'Laviny's' lost, which mind, I don't say she ain't, she's lost some
other way 'sides that, an' you can tell your friend so with my
compliments."

Cabot did not overhear these remarks, and wondered at the queer look on
the young skipper's face when he reentered the cabin, as he did at the
silence with which the latter resumed his preparations for supper. At
the same time he was still too weak, and, in spite of his biscuit, too
ravenously hungry to care for further conversation just then. So it
was only after a most satisfactory meal and several cups of very hot
tea that he was ready in his turn to ask questions. But he was not
given the chance; for, as soon as White Baldwin was through with
eating, he went on dock to relieve the tiller, and the other member of
the crew, whose name was David Gidge, came below.

He was a man of remarkable appearance, of very broad shoulders and long
arms; but with legs so bowed outward as to materially lower his
stature, which would have been short at best, and convert his gait into
an absurd waddle. His face was disfigured by a scar across one cheek
that so drew that corner of his mouth downward as to produce a
peculiarly forbidding expression. He also wore a bristling iron-grey
beard that grew in form of a fringe or ruff, and added an air of
ferocity to his make up.

As this striking-looking individual entered the cabin and rolled into a
seat at the table, he cast one glance, accompanied by a grunt, at
Cabot, and then proceeded to attend strictly to the business in hand.
He ate in such prodigious haste, and gulped his food in such vast
mouthfuls, that he had cleaned the table of its last crumb, and was
fiercely stuffing black tobacco into a still blacker pipe, before
Cabot, who really wished to talk with him, had decided how to open the
conversation. Lighting his pipe and puffing it into a ruddy glow, Mr.
Gidge made a waddling exit from the cabin, bestowing on our lad another
grunt as he passed him, and leaving an eddying wake of rank tobacco
smoke to mark his passage.

For some time after thi