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"Guess Uncle Salters's goin' to die this trip. Fust compliment he's ever paid me," Dan sniggered. "What's wrong with you, Harve? You act all quiet and you look greenish. Feelin' sick?" "Don't know what's the matter with me," Harvey implied. "Seems if my insides were too big for my outsides. I'm all crowded up and shivery." "Dispepsy? Pshaw too bad.
Every one wanted to say so much that no one said anything in particular. Harvey bade Dan take care of Uncle Salters's sea-boots and Penn's dory-anchor, and Long Jack entreated Harvey to remember his lessons in seamanship; but the jokes fell flat in the presence of the two women, and it is hard to be funny with green harbour-water widening between good friends.
Little Penn was so genuinely pained when Harvey made fun of Salters's lectures that the boy gave it up, and suffered in polite silence. That was very good for Harvey. The cook naturally did not join in these conversations.
"Did ye ever think how sweet 'twould be to sail wid a full crew o' Salterses?" said Long Jack. "Ha'af in the furrer an' other ha'af in the muck-heap, as Ca'houn did not say, an' makes out he's a fisherman!" A little laugh went round at Salters's expense.
Come out of this." On deck, in the sunlight, they held another consultation. "Queerest business ever I see," observed Charlie. "I never " "I see somethin' like it once," interrupted Bill. "Down in the Gulf 'twas. I was on the old Fishhawk. Eben Salters's dad from over to Bayport skippered her. We picked up a West Injy schooner, derelict, abandoned same as this one, but not anchored, of course.
Down below, the rasping sound of rough salt rubbed on rough flesh sounded like the whirring of a grindstone steady undertune to the "click-nick" of knives in the pen; the wrench and shloop of torn heads, dropped liver, and flying offal; the "caraaah" of Uncle Salters's knife scooping away backbones; and the flap of wet, open bodies falling into the tub.
Cheyne had been looking at the faces Disko's ivory-yellow, hairless, iron countenance; Uncle Salters's, with its rim of agricultural hair; Penn's bewildered simplicity; Manuel's quiet smile; Long Jack's grin of delight, and Tom Platt's scar. Rough, by her standards, they certainly were; but she had a mother's wits in her eyes, and she rose with out-stretched hands.
"Still, things should ha' been kep' sep'rate," said Disko, and the light of new argument lit in Salters's eye as he crumbled cut plug into his pipe. "There's a power av vartue in keepin' things sep'rate," said Long Jack, intent on stilling the storm. "That's fwhat Steyning of Steyning and Hare's f'und when he sent Counahan fer skipper on the Marilla D. Kuhn, instid o' Cap.
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