Chapter LI - Page 2

in the world a gang of wicked cowboys would suspect of guile; all of them, quite foolishly, thought he had more money than brains.

Eventually, however, the Narcissus was loaded, Cappy moved into the owner's suite, and his new-found friends bunked in a temporary deck house forward when they weren't busy below decks playing chambermaid to the cargo. And with Cappy's motor cruiser swung in the cradle, ready for launching from the main deck aft, the Narcissus slipped out of Galveston and went snoring across the Gulf of Mexico, bound for Le Havre.

Mike Murphy was not happy, however. He resented Cappy Ricks, who would persist in going below to inspect the cargo and in consequence smelled like a hostler. Moreover, Michael was the port captain of the Blue Star Navigation Company now and not the master of the ship; and the Narcissus wasn't out of sight of land before Mike made the discovery that the boatswain of the ship was absolutely inefficient, that the cook was wasteful, that the first officer was too talkative, and the skipper too easy-going.

And these conditions, on a ship he had once commanded, irked Murphy exceedingly. Terence Reardon was in much the same state of mind. Being port engineer, he investigated the engine room and found that his favorite monkey wrench had been lost; there were two leaky tubes in the main boiler; the ash hoist was out of kilter; his successor in the Narcissus was carrying ten pounds of steam less than Terence used to carry; and there was something not quite right with the condenser. The engine room crew Terence characterized to Mike Murphy as a gang of "vagabones," and hinted darkly at sweeping changes when the ship should get back to the United States. Once he went so far as to state that he might have expected as much when, upon leaving the Narcissus to become port engineer, he had given her to his old first assistant; since he had never known a first assistant, barring himself, to make a good chief!