No sooner had Cappy commenced to take life easy than Skinner commenced to dominate the business.  He attended an efficiency congress and came home with a collection of newfangled ideas that eliminated from the office all the joy and contentment old Cappy Ricks had been a life-time installing.  He inaugurated card systems and short cuts in bookkeeping that drove Cappy to the verge of insanity, because he could never go to the books himself and find out anything about his own business.  He had to ask Mr. Skinner—­which made Skinner an important individual.

With the passage of five years the general manager was high and low justice in Cappy’s offices, and had mastered the not-too-difficult art of dominating his employer, for Cappy seldom seriously disagreed with those he trusted.  He saved all his fighting force for his competitors.

However, Cappy’s interest in the Blue Star Navigation Company did not wane with the cessation of his activities as chief kicker.  Ordinarily, Mr. Skinner bossed the navigation company as he bossed the lumber business, for Cappy’s private office was merely headquarters for receiving mail, reading the newspapers, receiving visitors, smoking an after-luncheon cigar, and having a little nap from three o’clock until four, at which hour Cappy laid aside the cares of business and put in two hours at bridge in his club.

Despite this apparent indifference to business, however, Mr. Skinner handled the navigation company with gloves; for, if Cappy dozed in his office, he had a habit of keeping one eye open, so to speak, and every little while he would wake up and veto an order of Skinner’s, of which the latter would have been willing to take an oath Cappy had never heard.  In the matter of engaging new skippers or discharging old ones Mr. Skinner had to be very careful.  Cappy always declared that any clerk can negotiate successfully a charter at the going rates in a stiff market, but skippers are, in the final analysis, the Genii of the Dividends.  And Cappy knew skippers.  He could get more loyalty out of them with a mere pat on the back and a kindly word than could Mr. Skinner, with all his threats, nagging and driving, yet he was an employer who demanded a full measure of service, and never permitted sentiment to plead for an incompetent.  And his ships were his pets; in his affections they occupied a position but one degree removed from that occupied by his only child, in consequence of which he was mighty particular who hung up his master’s ticket in the cabin of a Blue Star ship.  Some idea of the scrupulous care with which he examined all applicants for a skipper’s berth may be gleaned from the fact that any man discharged from a Blue Star ship stood as much chance of obtaining a berth with one of Cappy Ricks’ competitors as a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat through Hades.