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Already a small group of the happy shore-staying folk had clustered on the dock. "Ring off," Captain MacElrath commanded in his slow thick voice; and the third officer worked the lever of the engine-room telegraph. "Gangway out!" called the second officer; and when this was accomplished, "That will do." It was the last task of all, gangway out. "That will do" was the dismissal.
Seventy-one years his father was, and had never slept a night out of his own bed in his own house on Island McGill. That was the life ideal, so Captain MacElrath considered, and he was prone to marvel that any man, not under compulsion, should leave a farm to go to sea. To this much-travelled man the whole world was as familiar as the village to the cobbler sitting in his shop.
"Oh, ut wasna onythun' tull greet about," Captain MacElrath assured him. "'Twas a guid ruddance. He was no a sailor, thot mate- fellow. He was only fut for a pugsty, an' a dom puir apology for thot same." It is said that there are three kinds of Irish Catholic, Protestant, and North-of-Ireland and that the North-of-Ireland Irishman is a transplanted Scotchman.
And when the health of relatives and friends had been inquired after, and the gossip of Island McGill narrated, along with the weather and the price of land and crops, there was little left to talk about save themselves, and Captain MacElrath took up the tale brought home for the good wife from all his world's-end wandering.
Himself he was Presbyterian, while in his own community five men were all that ever mustered at a meeting in the Orange Men's Hall. His community was the Island McGill, where seven thousand of his kind lived in such amity and sobriety that in the whole island there was but one policeman and never a public-house at all. Captain MacElrath did not like the sea, and had never liked it.
Captain MacElrath was a North-of-Ireland man, and, talking for much of the world like a Scotchman, nothing aroused his ire quicker than being mistaken for a Scotchman. Irish he stoutly was, and Irish he stoutly abided, though it was with a faint lip-lift of scorn that he mentioned mere South-of-Ireland men, or even Orange-men.
Ut wull be rainun' guid an' hearty for the day." Captain MacElrath was a small man, just comfortably able to peep over the canvas dodger of the bridge. The pilot and third officer loomed above him, as did the man at the wheel, a bulky German, deserted from a warship, whom he had signed on in Rangoon. But his lack of inches made Captain MacElrath a no less able man.
He communed with himself for a moment, and then muttered indignantly: "Tull error on fire-bars, sux pounds." "Hov ye heard of Jamie?" his wife asked in the pause. Captain MacElrath shook his head. "He was washed off the poop wuth three seamen." "Whereabouts?" "Off the Horn. 'Twas on the Thornsby." "They would be runnun' homeward bound?" "Aye," she nodded. "We only got the word three days gone.
"Aye, she was fair smokin' ot times, but not thot I minded thot so much as the lossin' of time. I hate like onythun' tull loss time." So saying, Captain MacElrath turned and glanced aft, aloft and alow, and the pilot, following his gaze, saw the mute but convincing explanation of that loss of time.
It was not the way of the Company, for the Company went on the principle of never allowing an employee to think himself indispensable or even exceedingly useful; wherefore, while quick to censure, it never praised. What was Captain MacElrath, anyway, save a skipper, one skipper of the eighty-odd skippers that commanded the Company's eighty-odd freighters on all the highways and byways of the sea?
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