I go a heap on your judgment, Matt."

"I'll start right away, sir," Matt promised, glad of any opportunity to
favor Cappy.

Two hours later, on his way back to the Mission Street bulkhead, he
passed, in Mission Bay, a huge, rusty red box of a steel freighter,
swinging at anchor. Under ordinary weather conditions Matt would have
paid no attention to her; but, as has already been stated, the northwest
trades were blowing a gale and had kicked up a sea; hence the steamer
was rolling freely at her anchorage, and as the launch bobbed by to
windward of her she rolled far over to leeward--and Matt saw something
that challenged his immediate attention and provoked his profound
disgust. The sides of the vessel below the water line were incrusted
with barnacles and eelgrass fully six inches thick!

No skipper that ever set foot on a bridge could pass that scaly hulk
unmoved. Matt Peasley said uncomplimentary things about the owners of
the vessel and directed the launchman to pass in under her stern, in
order that he might read her name. She proved to be the Narcissus, of
London.

He stood in the stern of the launch, staring thoughtfully after
the Narcissus, and before his mind there floated that vision of the
barnacles and eelgrass, infallible evidence that the years had been long
since the Narcissus had been hauled out.

"Do you know how long that steamer has lain there?" he queried of the
launchman.

"I been runnin' launches to and from Hunters Point for seven years an'
she was there when I come on the job," the latter answered.

"It's no place for a good ship," Matt Peasley murmured musingly. "She
ought to be out on the dark blue, loaded and earning good money for her
owners. I must find out why she isn't doing it."

Having rendered a meticulous report to Cappy on the condition of the
Amelia Ricks, Matt, his brain still filled with thoughts of that lonely
big steamer swinging neglected in Mission Bay among the rotting oyster
boats and old clipper ships waiting to be converted into coal hulks,
proceeded to the Merchants' Exchange where Lloyds' Register soon put him
in possession of the following information:

The steamer Narcissus had been built in Glasgow in 1894 by Sutherland
& Sons, Limited. She was four hundred and fifty-five feet
long, fifty-eight feet beam and thirty-one feet draft. She had
triple-expansion engines of two thousand indicated horse power, two
Scotch boilers, and was of seventy-five hundred tons n