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"There goes the old Barang, sir," groaned Barry, his thoughts on his ship as a good shipmaster's should be. "I could have saved her by towing her out and sinking her. No trouble at all to raise her again. Did it before, you know. Now she's gone." "It iss better so," replied Houten. The amazing man was scanning the nearby shore and gave no glance to his ruined ship.
Miss Nugent walked into the sitting-room, and listening in a perfunctory fashion to a shipmaster's platitude on kitchen-company, took a seat on his knee and kissed his ear. The downfall of Captain Nugent was for some time a welcome subject of conversation in marine circles at Sunwich.
She was the most ignorant old creature that ever was known, could neither read nor write, and made a sad jumble of the King's English when she spoke; yet, by mere natural quickness and rule-of-thumb, she could calculate to a Joe how much a Shipmaster's Washing-Bill came to.
I've known men drown to save them bad men, too; but this is the shipmaster's honour. And here this Captain Trent not hurried, not threatened with anything but a free passage in a British man-of-war has left them all behind. I don't want to express myself too strongly, because the facts appear against me, but the thing is impossible."
Predecessors in office had called it "writing the town report." Cap'n Sproul called it "loggin' the year's run." A pen never did hang easy in the old shipmaster's stiff fingers. The mental travail of this unwonted literary effort wrung his brain. An epic poet struggling with his masterpiece could not have been more rapt. And his nerves were correspondingly touchy.
Rose now looked grateful; and deeply grateful did she feel, and had reason to feel. Harry had concealed no portion of his history from her. Like herself, he was a shipmaster's child, but one better educated and better connected than was customary for the class. His father had paid a good deal of attention to the youth's early years, but had made a seaman of him, out of choice.
Then we separated, he to go on deck again, in obedience to that mysterious call that seems to sound for ever in a shipmaster's ears, I to stagger into my cabin with some vague notion of putting down the words "Very heavy weather" in a log-book not quite written up-to-date.
The shipmaster's esprit de corps prevented him from interfering personally, but he very much desired that the heavens would fall somehow or other so that justice might be done. A dens ex machina came to fill his wishes.
Though the two steamers were not in a hurry, both of them resumed their course as soon as the Blanche's boat was hoisted up to the davits; for it is part of the shipmaster's gospel to "keep moving" under all possible circumstances, and to lose no time in arriving at his destined port. All the passengers went below to prepare for the dinner.
That occasion now appeared to exist in earnest, for while the men were sheeting home the topsail, a flash of light illuminated the scene, when the roar of a gun came booming across the water, succeeded by the very distinct whistling of its shot. We regret that the relict of the late Captain Budd did not behave exactly as became a shipmaster's widow, under fire.
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