Captain Scraggs | Page 4

accepted Scraggs's offer of
seventy-five dollars a month--"and found"--to skipper the Maggie on
her coastwise run. As a first mate of steam he had no difficulty
inducing the Inspectors to grant him a license to skipper such an
abandoned craft as the Maggie, and accordingly he hung up his ticket in
her pilot house and was registered as her master, albeit, under a
gentlemen's agreement, with Scraggs he was not to claim the title of
captain and was known to the world as the Maggie's first mate, second
mate, third mate, quartermaster, purser, and freight clerk. One Neils
Halvorsen, a solemn Swede with a placid, bovine disposition,
constituted the fo'castle hands, while Bart McGuffey, a wastrel of the
Gibney type but slower-witted, reigned supreme in the engine room.
Also his case resembled that of Mr. Gibney in that McGuffey's job on
the Maggie was the first he had had in six months and he treasured it
accordingly. For this reason he and Gibney had been inclined to take
considerable slack from Captain Scraggs until McGuffey discovered
that, in all probability, no engineer in the world, except himself, would
have the courage to trust himself within range of the Maggie's boilers,
and, consequently, he had Captain Scraggs more or less at his mercy.
Upon imparting this suspicion to Mr. Gibney, the latter decided that it
would be a cold day, indeed, when his ticket would not constitute a
club wherewith to make Scraggs, as Gibney expressed it, "mind his P's
and Q's."
It will be seen, therefore, that mutual necessity held this queerly
assorted trio together, and, though they quarrelled furiously,
nevertheless, with the passage of time their own weaknesses and those

of the Maggie had aroused in each for the other a curious affection.
While Captain Scraggs frequently "pulled" a monumental bluff and
threatened to dismiss both Gibney and McGuffey--and, in fact,
occasionally went so far as to order them off his ship, on their part
Gibney and McGuffey were wont to work the same racket and resign.
With the subsidence of their anger and the return to reason, however,
the trio had a habit of meeting accidentally in the Bowhead saloon,
where, sooner or later, they were certain to bury their grudge in a
foaming beaker of steam beer, and return joyfully to the Maggie.
Of all the little ship's company, Neils Halvorsen, colloquially
designated as "The Squarehead," was the only individual who was, in
truth and in fact, his own man. Neils was steady, industrious, faithful,
capable, and reliable; any one of a hundred deckhand jobs were ever
open to Neils, yet, for some reason best known to himself, he preferred
to stick by the Maggie. In his dull way it is probable that he was
fascinated by the agile intelligence of Mr. Gibney, the vitriolic tongue
of Captain Scraggs, and the elephantine wit and grizzly bear courage of
Mr. McGuffey. At any rate, he delighted in hearing them snarl and
wrangle.
However, to return to the Maggie which we left entering the tule fog a
few miles north of Pilar Point:
CHAPTER III
Captain Scraggs and The Squarehead partook first of the ham and eggs,
coffee and bread which the skipper prepared. Scraggs then prepared a
similar meal for Mr. Gibney and McGuffey, set it in the oven to keep
warm, and descended to the engine room to relieve McGuffey for
dinner. Neils at the same time took the course from Mr. Gibney and
relieved the latter at the wheel. By this time, darkness had descended
upon the world, and the Maggie had entered the fog; following her
custom she proceeded in absolute silence, although as a partial offset to
the extreme liability to collision with other coastwise craft, due to the
non-whistling rule aboard the Maggie, Mr. Gibney had laid a course
half a mile inside the usual steamer lanes, albeit due to his

overwhelming desire for peace he had neglected to inform his owner of
this; the honest fellow proceeded upon the hypothesis that what people
do not know is not apt to trouble them.
Mr. McGuffey was already seated and disposing of his meal when Mr.
Gibney entered. "Gib," he declared with his mouth full, "rinse the taste
o' chewin' tobacco out o' your mouth before startin' to eat, an' then tell
me, as man to man, if them eggs is fit for human consumption."
Mr. Gibney conformed with the engineer's request. "Eatable but
venerable," was his verdict. "That infernal Scraggs is tryin' to make the
Maggie pay dividends at the expense of our stomachs."
"And at the risk of our lives, Gib. I move we declare a strike until
Scraggs digs up the money to overhaul the boiler. Just before we
slipped into the fog I saw two steam schooners headed south--so they
must 'a'