“I’m as likely to lend you half a dozen angels.  Look at the deck hands; look at the sickly trip this has been.  We’ve had to put some of them on double tricks at the wheel already, and as for getting any painting done, or having the ship cleaned up a bit, why, I can see we shall go into Liverpool as dirty as a Geordie collier.  Besides, Mr. Strake, I believe I’ve told you once or twice already that you’re not much use yourself, but anyway you’re the best that’s left, and I’m having to stand watch and watch with you as it is.  If the mate gets out of his bed between here and home, it’ll be to go over the side, and the second mate’s nearly as bad with that nasty blackwater fever only just off him; and there you are.  Mr. Strake, if you have a penn’oth of brains stowed away anywhere, I wish to whiskers you’d show ’em sometimes.”

“Old man’s mad at losing a nice lump of salvage,” thought Strake.  “Natural, I guess.”  So he said quietly:  “Ay, ay, sir,” and walked away to the other end of the bridge.

Captain Image followed him half-way, but stopped irresolutely with his hand on the engine-room telegraph.  On the fore main deck below him his old friend, Captain Owen Kettle, was leaning on the rail, staring wistfully at the derelict.

“Poor beggar,” Image mused, “’tisn’t hard to guess what he’s thinking about.  I wonder if I could fix it for him to take her home.  It might set him on his legs again, and he’s come low enough, Lord knows.  If I hadn’t given him a room in the first-class for old times’ sake, he’d have had to go home, after his trouble on the West Coast, as a distressed seaman, and touch his cap to me when I passed.  I’ve not done badly by him, but I shall have to pay for that room in the first-class out of my own pocket, and if he was to take that old wind-jammer in somewhere, he’d fork out, and very like give me a dash besides.

“Yes, I will say that about Kettle; he’s honest as a barkeeper, and generous besides.  He’s a steamer sailor, of course, and has been most of these years, and how he’ll do the white wings business again, Lord only knows.  Forget he hasn’t got engines till it’s too late, and then drown himself probably.  However, that’s his palaver.  Where we’re going to scratch him up a crew from’s the thing that bothers me.  Well, we’ll see.”  He leaned down over the bridge rail, and called.

Kettle looked up.

“Here a minute, Captain.”

Poor Kettle’s eye lit, and he came up the ladders with a boy’s quickness.

Image nodded toward the deserted vessel.  “Fine full-rigger, hasn’t she been?  What do you make her out for?”

“’Frisco grain ship.  Stuff in bulk.  And it’s shifted.”

“Looks that way.  Have you forgotten all your ‘mainsail haul’ and the square-rig gymnastics?”

“I’m hard enough pushed now to remember even the theory-sums they taught at navigation school if I thought they would serve me.”

“I know.  And I’m as sorry for you, Captain, as I can hold.  But you see, it’s this:  I’m short of sailormen; I’ve barely enough to steer and keep the decks clean; anyway I’ve none to spare.”