“Of all the blamed fools, next to you, Salters, him an’ his crowd are abaout the likeliest I’ve ever seen,” said Disko as the ‘We’re Here’ slid away.  “I was jest givin’ him my jedgment on lullsikin’ round these waters like a lost child, an’ you must cut in with your fool farmin’.  Can’t ye never keep things sep’rate?”

Harvey, Dan, and the others stood back, winking one to the other and full of joy; but Disko and Salters wrangled seriously till evening, Salters arguing that a cattle-boat was practically a barn on blue water, and Disko insisting that, even if this were the case, decency and fisher-pride demanded that he should have kept “things sep’rate.”  Long Jack stood it in silence for a time,—­an angry skipper makes an unhappy crew,—­and then he spoke across the table after supper: 

“Fwhat’s the good o’ bodderin’ fwhat they’ll say?” said he.

“They’ll tell that tale agin us fer years—­that’s all,” said Disko.  “Oil-cake sprinkled!”

“With salt, o’ course,” said Salters, Impenitent, reading the farming reports from a week-old New York paper.

“It’s plumb mortifyin’ to all my feelin’s,” the skipper went on.

“Can’t see ut that way,” said Long Jack, the peacemaker “Look at here, Disko!  Is there another packet afloat this day in this weather cud ha’ met a tramp an’ over an’ above givin’ her her reckonin’, —­over an’ above that, I say,—­cud ha’ discoorsed wid her quite intelligent on the management av steers an’ such at sea?  Forgit ut!  Av coorse they will not.  ’Twas the most compenjus conversation that iver accrued.  Double game an’ twice runnin’—­all to us.”  Dan kicked Harvey under the table, and Harvey choked in his cup.

“Well,” said Salters, who felt that his honour had been somewhat plastered, “I said I didn’t know as ‘twuz any business o’ mine, ’fore I spoke.”

“An’ right there,” said Tom Platt, experienced in discipline and etiquette—­“right there, I take it, Disko, you should ha’ asked him to stop ef the conversation wuz likely, in your jedgment, to be anyways—­what it shouldn’t.”

“Dunno but that’s so,” said Disko, who saw his way to an honourable retreat from a fit of the dignities.

“Why, o’ course it was so,” said Salters, “you bein’ skipper here; an’ I’d cheerful hev stopped on a hint—­not from any leadin’ or conviction, but fer the sake o’ bearin’ an example to these two blame boys of aours.”

“Didn’t I tell you, Harve, ’twould come araound to us ’fore we’d done?  Always those blame boys.  But I wouldn’t have missed the show fer a half-share in a halibutter,” Dan whispered.

“Still, things should ha’ been kep’ sep’rate,” said Disko, and the light of new argument lit in Salters’s eye as he crumbled cut plug into his pipe.

“There’s a power av vartue in keepin’ things sep’rate,” said Long Jack, intent on stilling the storm.  “That’s fwhat Steyning of Steyning and Hare’s f’und when he sent Counahan fer skipper on the Manila D. Kuhn, instid o’ Cap.  Newton that was took with inflam’try rheumatism an’ couldn’t go.  Counahan the Navigator we called him.”