“Peace!  I swan!” snorted Cap’n Ira. “’Rion Latham is about as much given to peace as a wild tagger.  But he knows which half of his biscuit’s buttered.  He’ll sail with Tunis as long as Tunis pays him wages.”

The captain continued to study the approaching schooner while Prudence went back to her household tasks.

CHAPTER II

THE CAPTAIN OF THE SEAMEW

Tunis Latham’s Seamew, tacking for the channel into Big Wreck Cove, wings full-spread, skimming the heaving blue of the summer sea, looked like a huge member of the tern family.  From Wreckers’ Head and the other sand bluffs guarding this roadstead from the heave of the Atlantic rollers, the schooner with her yachtlike lines was truly a picture to please the most exacting mariner.

On her deck paced the young captain whose personal affairs had been a subject of comment between Cap’n Ira Ball and his wife.  He was a heavy-set, upstanding, blue-jerseyed figure, lithe and as spry on his feet as a cat.  Tunis Latham was thirty, handsome in the bold way of longshore men, and ruddy-faced.  He had crisp, short, sandy hair; his cheeks, chin, and lip were scraped as clean as his palm; his eyes were like blue-steel points, but with humorous wrinkles at the outer corners of them, matched by a faint smile that almost always wreathed his lips.  Altogether he was a man that a woman would be sure to look at twice.

The revelation of the lighter traits of his character counteracted the otherwise sober look of Tunis Latham.  His sternness and fitness to command were revealed at first glance; his softer attributes dawned upon one later.

As he swayed back and forth across the deck of the flying Seamew, rolling easily in sailor gait to the pitching of the schooner, his sharp glance cast alow and then aloft betrayed the keen perception and attentive mind of the master mariner, while his surface appearance merely suggested a young man pridefully enjoying the novelty of pacing the deck of his first command.  For this was the maiden trip of the Seamew under this name and commanded by this master.

She was not a new vessel, but neither was she old.  At least, her decks were not marred, her rails were ungashed with the wear of lines, and even her fenders were almost shop-new.  Of course, any craft may have a fresh suit of sails; and new paint and gilding on the figurehead or a new name board under the stern do not bespeak a craft just off the builder’s ways.  Yet there was an appearance about the schooner-yacht which would assure any able seaman at first glance that she was still to be sea-tried.  She was like a maiden at her first dance, just venturing out upon the floor.

An old salt hung to the Seamew’s wheel as the bonny craft sped channelward.  Horace Newbegin was a veritable sea dog.  He had sailed every navigable sea in all this watery world, and sailed in almost every conceivable sort of craft.  And he had sailed many voyages under Tunis Latham’s father, who had owned and commanded the four-master Ada May, which, ill-freighted and ill-fated at last, had struck and sunk on the outer Hebrides, carrying to the bottom most of the hands as well as the commander of the partially insured ship.