When Matt Peasley’s Yankee combativeness, coupled with the accident of birth in the old home town of Cappy Ricks, gained for him command of the Blue Star Navigation Company’s big barkentine, Retriever, he lacked eight days of his twenty-first birthday.  He had slightly less beard than the average youth of his years; and, despite the fact that he had been exposed almost constantly to salty gales since his fourteenth birthday, he did not look his age.  And of all the ridiculous sights ashore or afloat the most ridiculous is a sea captain with the body of a Hercules and the immature features of an eighteen-year-old boy.

Indeed, such a great, soft, innocent baby type was Matt Peasley that even the limited sense of humor possessed by his motley crew forbade their reference to him, after custom immemorial, as the Old Man.  The formal title of captain seemed equally absurd; so they compromised by dubbing him Mother’s Darling.

“If,” quoth Mr. Michael Murphy, chief kicker of the Retriever, over a quiet pipe with Mr. Angus MacLean, the second mate, as the vessel lay at anchor in Grays Harbor, “Cappy Ricks had laid eyes on Mother’s Darling before ordering him to Seattle to go up for his master’s ticket, the old fox would have scuttled the ship sooner than trust that baby with her.”

“Ye’ll nae be denying the lad kens his business,” Mr. MacLean declared.

“Aye!  True enough, Mac; but ’twould be hard to convince Cappy Ricks o’ that.  Every skipper in his employ is a graybeard.”

“Mayhap,” the canny MacLean retorted.  “That’s because t’owd boy’s skippers have held their berths ower long.”

But Mr. Murphy shook his head.  He had come up from before the mast in the ships of the Blue Star Navigation Company, and since he had ambitions he had been at some pains to acquaint himself with the peculiarities of the president of that corporation.

“Give Cappy Ricks one look into Matt Peasley’s face and I’ll be skippering the Retriever,” he declared.

And in this he was more than half right, for Cappy Ricks had never met Matt Peasley, and when the Old Man made up his mind that he wanted the boy to skipper his barkentine, the Retriever, he was acting entirely on instinct.  He only knew that in Matt Peasley he had a man who had shipped out before the mast and returned from the voyage in command of the ship, and naturally such an exploit challenged recognition of the most signal nature—­particularly when, in its performance, the object of Cappy’s admiration had demonstrated that he was possessed of certain sterling attributes which are commonly supposed to make for success in any walk of life.

Since Matt Peasley had accomplished a man’s work it never occurred to Cappy Ricks to consider that the object of his interest might be a boy.  Young he knew him to be—­that is to say, Cappy figured the rascal to be somewhere between thirty and thirty-five.

Had he known, however, that his prospective captain had but recently attained his majority the Old Man would have ascribed Matt Peasley’s record-breaking voyage from Cape Town to Grays Harbor as sheer luck, and forthwith would have set Master Matthew down for a five-year apprenticeship as first mate; for Cappy was the product of an older day, and held that gray hairs and experience are the prime requisites for a berth as master.