looked down at once. It was not my part to
encourage sneering on board my ship. It must be said, too, that I knew
very little of my officers. In consequence of certain events of no
particular significance, except to myself, I had been appointed to the
command only a fortnight before. Neither did I know much of the hands
forward. All these people had been together for eighteen months or so,
and my position was that of the only stranger on board. I mention this
because it has some bearing on what is to follow. But what I felt most
was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be
told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself. The youngest man on board
(barring the second mate), and untried as yet by a position of the
fullest responsibility, I was willing to take the adequacy of the others
for granted. They had simply to be equal to their tasks; but I wondered
how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own
personality every man sets up for himself secretly.

Meantime the chief mate, with an almost visible effect of collaboration
on the part of his round eyes and frightful whiskers, was trying to
evolve a theory of the anchored ship. His dominant trait was to take all
things into earnest consideration. He was of a painstaking turn of mind.
As he used to say, he "liked to account to himself" for practically
everything that came in his way, down to a miserable scorpion he had
found in his cabin a week before. The why and the wherefore of that
scorpion--how it got on board and came to select his room rather than
the pantry (which was a dark place and more what a scorpion would be
partial to), and how on earth it managed to drown itself in the inkwell
of his writing desk--had exercised him infinitely. The ship within the
islands was much more easily accounted for; and just as we were about
to rise from table he made his pronouncement. She was, he doubted not, a
ship from home lately arrived. Probably she drew too much water to cross
the bar except at the top of spring tides. Therefore she went into that
natural harbor to wait for a few days in preference to remaining in an
open roadstead.

"That's so," confirmed the second mate, suddenly, in his slightly hoarse
voice. "She draws over twenty feet. She's the Liverpool ship Sephora
with a cargo of coal. Hundred and twenty-three days from Cardiff."

We looked at him in surprise.

"The tugboat skipper told me when he came on board for you