“I don’t want her,” Captain Price told him.  “There’s a time for nursin’ tender engines and a time for scrappin’ them.  I’m for the scrap heap, David.  I’m not the man I was.  I don’t put faith in myself no more.  It’s Arthur’s turn now.”

David Davis nodded.  “Yes, then.  Well, well, now!  It’s a pity, too, John.  But you know what’s best, to be sure.  I don’t want you to go without a ship while I’ve got a bottom afloat, but I don’t want you to put the Stormberg to roost on the rocks of Lundy neither.  So you wouldn’t put faith in yourself no more!”

“No,” said Captain Price, frowning reflectively “I wouldn’t, and that’s the truth.”  He was seated in a plush-covered arm-chair in Davis’s parlour, and now he leaned forward.  “It’s this arm of mine.  It isn’t there, but I can’t get rid of the feeling of it.  I’m always reachin’ for things with it.  I’d be reachin’ for the telegraph in a hurry, I make no doubt.”

“That’s funny,” said Davis, in sympathy.  “Well, then, you just stop visiting with me.  I’ve no mind to be alone in the house when your Arthur’s gone off with my Minnie.  He’ll push the Burdock back an’ fore for us, and we’ll sit ashore like gentlemen.  He makes a good figure of a skipper, don’t he, John?”

Old Captain Price sighed.  “Aye, he looks well on the bridge,” he said.  “I hope he’ll watch the ship, though; she’s a big old tub to handle.”

He saw the Burdock into dry dock and strolled down each day to look at her.  Minnie and Arthur were busy with preparations for the wedding.  But the girl found time to go down once with the old man, and he took her into the dock under the steamship.

“A big thing she looks from here,” he said, half to himself.

The girl looked forward.  Over them the bottom plates of the Burdock made a great sloping roof; her rolling chocks stood out like galleries.  Her lines bulged heavily out, and the girl saw the immensity of the great fabric, the power of the tool her husband should wield.

“She’s big, indeed,” she answered.  “Five thousand tons and forty lives in one man’s hands.  It’s splendid, uncle.  And Arthur,” her voice softened pleasantly, “is the man.”

The old Captain wheeled on her sharply.  “Tons and lives!” he cried.  “Tons and lives be damned!  It’s not for them she’s been run to a thumb-span and tended like a sick baby.  It’s for the clean honesty of it, to do a captain’s work like a wise captain and not soil a record.  D’ye think I stump my bridge for forty-eight hours on end because of the underwriters and the deck hands?  Not me, my girl, not me!  It’s my trade to lay her sweetly in Barcelona bay, and it’s my honor to know my work and do it.”

He seemed to shrug his shoulder.  The girl could not know it was his right hand he flung up to the scarred steel plates above him.

“There’s your Burdock,” he said.  “She’s your dividend-grinder; she’s my ship.  And if I’d thought of no more than your five thousand tons and your forty lives, she’d not be where she is.”