“It’s not acting,” he would say.  “You drop off to sleep some night on this bridge, and you’ll find out what he’s after.  He’s after you if you don’t keep your weather eye liftin’; and don’t you forget it!”

In those days the Burdock had a standing charter from Cardiff to Barcelona and back with ore to Swansea, a comfortable round trip which brought the Captain and his son home for one week in every six.

It suited the mate’s convenience excellently, for he was a man of social habits, and he had at last succeeded in interesting Miss Minnie Davis in his movements.  She was the daughter of the Burdock’s owner, and Arthur Price’s cousin in some remote degree, a plump, clean, clever Welsh girl, of quick intelligence and pleasant good nature.  He was a tall young man, a little leggy in his way, who filled the eye splendidly.  Women said of him that he “looked every inch a sailor”; matrons who watched his progress with Minnie Davis considered that they would make a handsome couple.  Captain Price, for all his watchfulness, saw nothing of the affair.  He approved of Minnie, though; she was born to a share in that life in which ships are breadwinners, and never had to be shoo’d out of the way of hauling or hoisting gear when she came down aboard the Burdock in dock.  Her way was straight across the deck to the poop ladder and for’ard to the chart-house along the fore-and-aft bridge, trim, quiet-footed, familiar.  “What did you find in the Bay?” she would ask, as she shook hands with Captain Price; and he would answer as to one who understood:  “It was piling up a bit from the sou’west;” or “smooth enough to skate on,” as the case might be.  Then, without further formality, he would return to his papers, and Arthur Price would hand over his work to the third mate and wash his hands before coming up to make himself agreeable.  He always had more to say about the trip than his father, and he was prone to translate the weather into shore speech.  Minnie only half liked his fashion of talking of “storms” and “tempests”; but there was plenty else in him she liked well enough.  Best of all, perhaps, she liked the sight of him—­a head taller than his father, clean-shaven and accurately groomed, smiling readily and moving easily; he was a capital picture.

She fell into a way of driving down to see the Burdock off.  It was thus that Captain Price learned how matters stood.  He came straight from the office to the ship, on a brisk July day and went off to her at her buoys in the mud-pilot’s boat.  All was clear for a start and the lock was waiting; Arthur Price, in the gold-laced cap he used as due to his rank, was standing by to cast off.  The Captain went forthwith to the bridge; Minnie on the dock-head could see his black shore-hat over the weather-cloths and his white collar of ceremony.  She smiled a little, for she did not know quite enough to see the art with which the Captain drew off from his moorings under his own steam, nor his splendid handling of the big boat as he bustled her down the crowded dock and laid her blunt nose cleanly between the piers of the lock.  She was watching the brass-buttoned chief mate lording it on the fo’c’sle head, as he passed the lines to haul into the lock.