The shoveller sprang from the platform and began clambering over the slippery, slimy rocks like a crab, his red shirt marked with the white “X” of his suspenders in relief against the blue water.  When he reached the outermost edge of the stone pile, where the ten-ton blocks lay, he made a megaphone of his fingers and repeated the captain’s orders to the Susie Ann.

Baxter listened with his hands cupped to his ears.

“Who says so?” came back the reply.

“Cap’n Joe.”

“What fur?”

“Goin’ to blow,—­don’t ye see it?”

Baxter stepped gingerly along the sloop’s rail.  Obeying the order meant twenty-four hour’s delay in making sure of his wages,—­perhaps a week, spring weather being uncertain.  He didn’t “see no blow.”  Besides, if there was one coming, it wasn’t his sloop or his stone.  When he reached the foot of the bowsprit Moon-face sent this answer over the water: 

“Let her blow and be d—!  This sloop’s chartered to deliver this stone.  We’ve got steam up and the stuff’s goin’ over outside.  Get your divers ready.  I ain’t shovin’ no baby carriage and don’t you forgit it.  I’m comin’ on!  Cast off that buoy line, you,”—­ this to one of his men.

Captain Joe continued stripping off his leaden breastplate.  He had heard his order repeated and knew that it had been given correctly,—­Baxter’s subsequent proceedings did not interest him.  If he had anything to say in answer it was of no moment to him.  His word was law on the Ledge; first, because the men daily trusted their lives to his guidance, and, second, because they all loved him with a love hard for a landsman to understand, especially today, when the boss and the gang never, by any possibility, pull together.

“Baxter says he’s comin’ on, sir,” said Billy, when he reached the captain’s side, the grin on his sunburnt face widening until its two ends hooked over his ears.  Billy had heard nothing so funny for weeks.

“Comin’ on?”

“That’s what he hollered.  Wants you to git ready to take his stuff, sir.”

I was out of the shanty now.  I came in two jumps.  With that squall rushing from the eastward and the tide making flood, any man who would leave the protection of the spar buoy for the purpose of unloading was fit for a lunatic asylum.

Captain Joe had straightened up and was screening his eyes with his hand when I reached his side, his gaze rivetted on the loosened sloop, which had now hauled in her tether line and was drifting clear of the buoy.  The captain was still incredulous.

“No, he ain’t comin’,” he said to me.  “He’s all right,—­he’ll port his helm in a minute,—­but he’d better send up his jib”—­and he swept his eye around, —­“and that quick, too.”

At this instant the sloop wavered and lurched heavily.  The outer edge of the insuck had caught her bow.