Corkey is seized with a paroxysm.  He gives a screeching sneeze, and the cries of the sick grow furious.

“Who is that?” asks the mate, peering out of his room and then going on deck.

David Lockwin is at the end of his forces.  This is life.  This is politics.  This is expediency.  This is the way men become illustrious.  He straightens his legs, sinks his chin and pushes his hands far in his pockets.

“Before I begin,” says Corkey, “let me tell ye, that if you’re sick I’d keep off the decks.  You have a gold watch.  Some one might nail ye.”

“Is that so?” asks Lockwin, his thoughts far away.

“He beats me!” comments the contestant.  “Well, pard, if you’re not sick, I’d like to say a good many things.  I suppose them ducks at Washington weakened.  If they give me collector, here’s my slate.”

Corkey produces a long list of names, written on copy-paper.

“I bet she don’t budge an inch,” he remarks, as he hears the north wind and waves pounding at one end, and the engine pounding at the other.

“Needn’t be afraid, pard.  Sometimes they go out in Georgian Bay and burn some coal.  Then if they can’t git anywhere, they come back.”

Corkey is pleased with his own remark.  “Sometimes,” he adds, “they don’t come back.  They are bluffed back by the wind.”

Lockwin sits in the same uncommunicative attitude.

“Pardner, you didn’t come out into Georgian Bay for nothing.  I know that.  So I will tell you what I am going to do with the collectorship.  By the great jumping Jewhillikins, that’s a wave in the stateroom windows!  I never see anything like that.”

The captain passes.

“High sea, cap’n!” It is not in good form for Corkey to rise.  He is a passenger, with a navigator’s reputation to sustain.

“High hell!” says the captain.

“What a hullabaloo them choppers is a-making,” says Corkey to Lockwin.  “I reckon they’re about scared to death.  Well, as I was a-saying, I want to know what the jam-jorum said.”

Corkey is terrified.  He does not fear that he will go down in Georgian Bay.  He dreads to hear the bursting of the bladders that are supporting him in his sea of glory.

Lockwin starts as from a waking dream: 

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Corkey, but I could have told you at the start that the administration, when it was confronted by the question whether or not it would give you anything, said; ‘No!’ It will give you nothing.  The administration said it would not appoint you lightkeeper at Ozaukee.”

“There hain’t no light at Ozaukee,” says Corkey.

“That’s what the administration said, too,” replies Lockwin.

“Did you tell ’em I got you fine?” asks Corkey.

“I told them I thought you had as good a case as I had.”

“Did you tell ’em I’d knock seventeen kinds of stuffin’ out of their whole party?  That I’d—­”