"On the morning of the third day came the skippers of the three schooners and that mate in a small boat.
"By and by, the schooners full of copra and beche-de-mer and our trees empty of cocoanuts, the three skippers and that mate called us all together for a big talk.
What was Captain MacElrath, anyway, save a skipper, one skipper of the eighty-odd skippers that commanded the Company's eighty-odd freighters on all the highways and byways of the sea?
The pilot grunted, while the skipper swept on with his glass from the launch to the strip of beach and to Kingston beyond, and then slowly across the entrance to Howth Head on the northern side.
"The skipper's a brute," said I, "but he's the right brute in the right place to-night, Ready !"
"You see, Miss Denison," I continued ecstatically, "our rough old diamond of a skipper is the right man in the right place after all.
A very excited officer yelled at them through a speaking- trumpet, and she lay and lollopped helplessly on the water while Disko ran the "We're Here" under her lee and gave the
skipper a piece of his mind.
Sprawling over that seaman's silent and trusted adviser, with one elbow upon the coast of Africa and the other planted in the neighbourhood of Cape Hatteras (it was a general track-chart of the North Atlantic), my
skipper lifted his rugged, hairy face, and glared at me in a half-exasperated, half-appealing way.
She had signaled us to stop, and our
skipper had ignored the order; but now she had her gun trained on us, and the second shot grazed the cabin, warning the belligerent tug-captain that it was time to obey.
She was the chattel of the Minota's splendid
skipper. So much did Mrs.
Between squalls the Flibberty-Gibbet ran in to anchorage, and her
skipper, Pete Oleson (brother to the Oleson of the Jessie), ancient, grizzled, wild-eyed, emaciated by fever, dragged his weary frame up the veranda steps and collapsed in a steamer-chair.
I believe he had seen us out of the window coming off to dine in the dinghy of a fourteen-ton yawl belonging to Marlow my host and
skipper. We helped the boy we had with us to haul the boat up on the landing-stage before we went up to the riverside inn, where we found our new acquaintance eating his dinner in dignified loneliness at the head of a long table, white and inhospitable like a snow bank.