The Belted Seas | Page 3

way, which he surely
did. The afternoon slipped on, hour by hour, and the fire snapped and
cast its red light in our faces, and the kettle sung and the storm outside
kept up its mad business, and the surf its monotone.
"I was so, when I was a lad of eighteen or nineteen," Captain
Buckingham said. "I was a wild one, though not large, but limber and
clipper-built, and happy any side up, and my notion of human life was
that it was something like a cake-walk, and something like a Bartlett
pear, as being juicy anywhere you bit in."
CHAPTER II.

THE "HEBE MAITLAND." CAPTAIN BUCKINGHAM'S
NARRATIVE.
"I was that way," he said, "full of opinions, like one of those little
terrier pups with his tail sawed off, so he wags with the stump, same
way a clock does with the pendulum when the weight's gone --pretty
chipper. I used to come often from the other end of Newport Street,
where I was born, to Pemberton's. But that wasn't on account of
Pemberton, though he was agreeable, but on account of Madge
Pemberton. Madge and I were agreed, and Pemberton was agreeable,
but I was restless and keyed high in those days, resembling pups, as
stated.
"No anchoring to Pemberton's chimney for me," I says. "No digging
clams and fishing for small fry in Long Island Sound for me. I'm going
to sea."
And Madge asks, "Why?" calm and reasonable, and I was near stumped
for reasons, having only the same reason as a lobster has for being
green. It's the nature of him, which he'll change that colour when he's
had experience and learned what's what in the boiling. I fished around
for reasons.
"When I'm rich," I says, "I'll fix up Pemberton's for a swell hotel."
Madge says, "It's nice as it is," and acted low in her mind. But if she
thought the less of me for wanting to go to sea, I couldn't say. Maybe
not.
I left Greenough in the year '65, and went to New York, and the
wharves and ships of East River, and didn't expect it would take me
long to get rich.
There were fine ships and many in those days in the East River slips.
South Street was full of folk from all over the world, but I walked there
as cocky as if I owned it, looking for a ship that pleased me, and I came
to one lying at dock with the name _Hebe Maitland_ in gilt letters on a
board that was screwed to her, and I says, "Now, there's a ship!" Then I

heard a man speak up beside me saying, "Just so," and I turned to look
at him.
He didn't seem like a seaman, but was an old man, and grave-looking,
and small, and precise in manner, and not like one trained to the sea,
and wore a long, rusty black coat; and his upper lip was shaven.
"You like her, do ye?" he said. "Now I'm thinking you know a good
one when you see her."
I said I thought I did, speaking rather knowing. But when he asked if I'd
been to sea, I had to say I hadn't; not on the high seas, nor in any such
vessel as the Hebe Maitland. She was painted dingy black, like most of
the others, and I judged from her lines that she was a fleet sailer and
built for that purpose, rather than for the amount of cargo she might
carry.
"Why, come aboard," he said, and soon we were seated in a cabin with
shiny panels, and a hinge table that swung down from the wall between
us. He looked at me through half-shut eyes, pursing his dry lips, and he
asked me where I came from.
That was my first meeting with Clyde. I know now that my coming
from Connecticut was a point in my favour; still I judge he must have
taken to me from the start. He surely was good to me always, and that
curiously.
"You want a job," he says. "You've sailed a bit on fishing smacks in the
Sound. But more'n that, the point with you is you're ambitious, and not
above turning a penny or two in an odd way."
"That depends on the way," I says pretty uppish, and thinking I wasn't
to be inveigled into piracy that way.
"Just so?"
"Maybe I've got scruples," I says, and not a bit did I know what I was
talking about. Captain Clyde rapped the table with his knuckles.

"I'm glad to hear you say it. Scruples! That's the word, and a right word
and a good word. I don't allow any vicious goings-on aboard this ship.
Wherever we go we carry the laws of the