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Now, Neils had sailed too long with Captain Scraggs not to realize that the erstwhile green-pea trader would be the last man to take a chance in any hazardous enterprise unless forced thereto by the weight of circumstance; also there was affection enough in his simple Scandinavian heart to cause him to feel just a little worried when two weeks passed and Captain Scraggs failed to show up.
When, eventually, the railroad had been extended sufficiently far down the coast to enable the farmers to haul their goods to the railroad in trucks, the Maggie automatically went out of the green-pea trade; simultaneously, Captain Scraggs's note to McGuffey fell due and the engineer demanded payment. Scraggs demurred, pleading poverty, but Mr.
Nature had blessed him with a strong constitution amidships and the contiguity of his tainted fortune bothered him but little. He squinted over the tip of the cigar at Captain Scraggs. "You're just the same old Scraggsy you was in the green-pea trade. All you need is a ring in yer nose, Scraggsy, to make you a human hog.
The fowls were just devouring the last of the green-pea shoots, and the potatoes had been blackened by our first frosts. It was all very nice and trim and comfortable, except the loneliness; that must have been simply awful. It is difficult to realise how completely cut off from the society of his kind a New Zealand up-country shepherd is, especially at an out-station like this.
But I'm hungry for a smell o' Channel creek at low tide. I tell you, Gib, rovin' and wild adventure's all right, but the old green-pea trade wasn't so durned bad, after all." "You bet!" McGuffey's response was very fervid. "Them was the happy days," supplemented the commodore. He was as joyous as a schoolboy.
Gibney's partiality for that form of nutriment in the vanished days of the green-pea trade. "Ham an' fried eggs an' a sizzlin' pot o' coffee. Thought a way out o' our mess, Gib?" "Not yet," replied Mr. Gibney as he rolled out of bed, "but eggs is always stimulatin', and I don't give up hope on a full stomach." An hour later they were tied up under the coal bunkers, and at Mr.
Neils Halvorsen, of all men! Old Neils, "the squarehead" deckhand of the green-pea trade! Dull, bowlegged Neils, with his lost dog smile and his Mr. Gibney rubbed his eyes feebly and half staggered to his feet. What was that? A shout? Without doubt he had heard a sound that was not the moaning of their remorseless prison-keeper, the sea. And "Hands off," shrieked Mr.
"If Neils Halvorsen had asked you that question when he come to rescue you the day you lay a-dyin' o' thirst on that desert island, wouldn't you have said yes?" "Sure pop." "Then don't ask no questions that's unworthy of you," said Mr. Gibney severely. "I don't want to see none o' them green-pea trade ethics croppin' up in you, Scraggsy.
"Gib, my dear boy," he sputtered, "are you sure it ain't all a dream and that we'll wake up some day and find that we're still in the green-pea trade; that all these months we've been asleep under a cabbage leaf, communin' with potato bugs?" "Not for a minute," replied the commodore. "Why, I got a dozen matched pearls here that's fit for a queen. Big, red, pear-shaped boys regular bleedin' hearts.
Scraggs a-peckin' at him every time he goes home, an' the Maggie's a worry, not to mention the fact that there ain't much more'n a decent livin' for him in the green-pea trade. An' he ain't gittin' any younger, Bart. You got to bear that in mind." "Yes, an' he's been disapp'inted in his ambitions," McGuffey agreed.
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