can turn to and eat, or turn in and sleep any minute, day or night. So
now we turned to. Clancy did great things to the wine. Generally he
took whiskey, but he did not object to good wine now and then. He and
one fellow in a blue coat, white duck trousers, and a blue cap that
never left his head, had a great chat.

"I callate that if he didn't have that cap with the button on front
nobody'd know he was a real yachtsman, would they?" Eddie Parsons
whispered in my ear.

The owner of the steam-yacht was trying to convince Tommie that
yachting would be more in his line than fishing, but Tommie couldn't
see it.

"But why not?" he asked at last. "Why not, Mr. Clancy? Is it a matter
of money? If it is, I'll make that right. I pay ordinary hands
twenty-five and thirty dollars a month and found, but I'll pay you
fifty--sixty--seventy dollars a month to go with me. I'm going to race
this steamer this summer and I want a quartermaster--a man like you
that can steer to a hair-line. Seventy dollars a month now--what do
you say?"

"Come now, my good man, what do you say?" Clancy got that off without
so much as a smile. "But you couldn't make it seventy-five now, could
you? No, I didn't mean that quite, though I've been out the dock in
Gloucester of a Saturday noon and back again to the dock of a Tuesday
noon--three days--and shared two hundred dollars--not as skipper, mind
you, but just as hand. There now, I hope you're not going to get
angry. Hadn't we better have another little touch? But I can see
myself in a suit of white duck, touching my cap, and saying, 'Aye,
aye, sir,' to some slob--no reference to you, mind you--but some slob
in a uniform that's got a yacht, not because he loves the sea, but
because he wants to butt in somewhere--who lives aboard his yacht just
the same as he does in his house ashore--electric bells, baths,
servants, barber and all--and hugs the shore so close that he gets the
morning paper as regularly as when he's at home. When that kind go
yachting all they miss are the tables on the lawn and the automobiles
going by the door. They even have canary-birds--some of them--in
cages. Yes, and wouldn't be caught twenty miles off shore--no, not
even in a summer's breeze for--And where would he be in a winter's
gale? I can see myself rowing a gig with somebody like that in the
stern giving orders and fooling--well, some simple-minded women folks,
maybe, who know as much of the sea as they do of the next wo