“You’re pretty much of a child to have an unlimited ticket, my son,” the supervising inspector informed him.  “However, you’ve had the experience and your record is far above the average, so we’re going to issue the license; but if you’ll take a bit of advice from an old sailor you’ll be content to go as second mate for a year or two more, until your jowls blacken up a bit and you get a trifle thicker in the middle.”

With the impudence and irreverence of his tender years, however, Matt Peasley scorned this well-meant advice, notwithstanding the fact that he knew it to be sound, for by shipping as second mate and remaining in the same ship, sooner or later his chance would come.  The first mate would quit, or be promoted or drowned, or get drunk; and then his shoes would be waiting for Matt tried and true, and the holder of a first mate’s ticket.

However, there is an old saw to the effect that youth must be served, and young Matt desired a helping totally disproportionate to his years, if not to his experience; hence he elected to ignore the fact that shipmasters are wary of chief mates until they have first tried them out as second mates and learned their strength and their weaknesses.  Being very human, Matt thought he should prove the exception to a fairly hard-and-fast rule.

He had slept one night on a covered dock and skipped three meals before it occurred to him that he had pursued the wrong tactics.  He was too far from Thomaston, Maine, where the majority of sailors have gone to school with their captains.  Back home there were a dozen masters who knew his people, who knew him and his proved ability; but out here on the Pacific Coast the skippers were nearly all Scandinavians, and Matt had to show them something besides his documents.

He had failed signally to procure a single opportunity to demonstrate his fitness for an executive position.  After abandoning his plan to ship as chief mate he had sought a second mate’s berth, but failing to find one, and with each idle day making deeper inroads into his scant savings, he had at length descended to the ignominy of considering a job as bosun.  Even that was not forthcoming, and now his money was entirely dissipated.

Now, when a big overgrown kid finds himself penniless three thousand miles from a friend and minus three meals in succession, the fourth omission of the daily bread is not likely to pass without violent protest.  Matt was still a growing boy, with a growing boy’s appetite; consequently on the morning of his second day of fasting he came to the conclusion that, with so much of his life before him, a few months wasted would, after all, have no material bearing on his future; so he accepted a two months advance from a crimp and shipped aboard the American barkentine Retriever as a common A.B.—­a most disgraceful action on the part of a boy, who, since eighteenth birthday, had been used to having old sailors touch their foretop to him and address him as “Mr. Peasley, sir.”