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Jack Benton turned his head rather stealthily as I looked away, and then he hid the thing in his trousers pocket, and went aft on the lee side, out of sight. The men had got the sheet pennant on a stretch to serve it, but I ducked under it and stood where I could see what Jack did, just under the fore-staysail. He couldn’t see me, and he was looking about for something. His hand shook as he picked up a bit of half-bent iron rod, about a foot long, that had been used for turning an eye-bolt, and had been left on the main-hatch. His hand shook as he got a piece of marline out of his pocket, and made the water-logged pipe fast to the iron. He didn’t mean it to get adrift, either, for he took his turns carefully, and hove them taut and then rode them, so that they couldn’t slip, and made the end fast with two half-hitches round the iron, and hitched it back on itself. Then he tried it with his hands, and looked up and down the deck furtively, and then quietly dropped the pipe and iron over the rail, so that I didn’t even hear the splash. If anybody was playing tricks on board, they weren’t meant for the cook.

I asked some questions about Jack Benton, and one of the men told me that he was off his feed, and hardly ate anything, and swallowed all the coffee he could lay his hands on, and had used up all his own tobacco and had begun on what his brother had left.

“The doctor says it ain’t so, sir,” said the man, looking at me shyly, as if he didn’t expect to be believed; “the doctor says there’s as much eaten from breakfast to breakfast as there was before Jim fell overboard, though there’s a mouth less and another that eats nothing. I says it’s the cabin-boy that gets it. He’s bu’sting.”

I told him that if the cabin-boy ate more than his share, he must work more than his share, so as to balance things. But the man laughed queerly, and looked at me again.

“I only said that, sir, just like that. We all know it ain’t so.”

“Well, how is it?”

“How is it?” asked the man, half-angry all at once. “I don’t know how it is, but there’s a hand on board that’s getting his whack along with us as regular as the bells.”

“Does he use tobacco?” I asked, meaning to laugh it out of him, but as I spoke I remembered the water-logged pipe.

“I guess he’s using his own still,” the man answered, in a queer, low voice. “Perhaps he’ll take some one else’s when his is all gone.”

It was about nine o’clock in the morning, I remember, for just then the captain called to me to stand by the chronometer while he took his fore observation. Captain Hackstaff wasn’t one of those old skippers who do everything themselves with a pocket watch, and keep the key of the chronometer in their waistcoat pocket, and won’t tell the mate how far the dead reckoning is out. He was rather the other way, and I was glad of it, for he generally let me work the sights he took, and just ran his eye over my figures afterwards. I am bound to say his eye was pretty good, for he would pick out a mistake in a logarithm, or tell me that I had worked the “Equation of Time” with the wrong sign, before it seemed to me that he could have got as far as “half the sum, minus the altitude.” He was always right, too, and besides he knew a lot about iron ships and local deviation, and adjusting the compass, and all that sort of thing. I don’t know how he came to be in command of a fore-and-aft schooner. He never talked about himself, and maybe he had just been mate on one of those big steel square-riggers, and something had put him back. Perhaps he had been captain, and had got his ship aground, through no particular fault of his, and had to begin over again. Sometimes he talked just like you and me, and sometimes he would speak more like books do, or some of those Boston people I have heard. I don’t know. We have all been shipmates now and then with men who have seen better days. Perhaps he had been in the Navy, but what makes me think he couldn’t have been, was that he was a thorough good seaman, a regular old wind-jammer, and understood sail, which those Navy chaps rarely do. Why, you and I have sailed with men before the mast who had their master’s certificates in their pockets,–English Board of Trade certificates, too,–who could work a double altitude if you would lend them a sextant and give them a look at the chronometer, as well as many a man who commands a big square-rigger. Navigation ain’t everything, nor seamanship, either. You’ve got to have it in you, if you mean to get there.