Chapter 5 - Page 2

"germans" at parties where the oldest girl was not quite fifteen,
but all the presents were solid silver. Salters protested that
this kind of yarn was desperately wicked, if not indeed positively
blasphemous, but he listened as greedily as the others; and their
criticisms at the end gave Harvey entirely new notions on
"germans," clothes, cigarettes with gold-leaf tips, rings,
watches, scent, small dinner-parties, champagne, card-playing, and
hotel accommodation. Little by little he changed his tone when
speaking of his "friend," whom Long Jack had christened "the Crazy
Kid," "the Gilt-edged Baby," "the Suckin' Vanderpoop," and other
pet names; and with his sea-booted feet cocked up on the table
would even invent histories about silk pajamas and specially
imported neckwear, to the "friend's" discredit. Harvey was a very
adaptable person, with a keen eye and ear for every face and tone
about him.

Before long he knew where Disko kept the old green-crusted
quadrant that they called the "hog-yoke" - under the bed-bag in
his bunk. When he 'took the sun, and with the help of "The Old
Farmer's" almanac found the latitude, Harvey would jump down into
the cabin and scratch the reckoning and date with a nail on the
rust of the stove-pipe. Now, the chief engineer of the liner could
have done no more, and no engineer of thirty years' service could
have assumed one half of the ancient-mariner air with which
Harvey, first careful to spit over the side, made public the
schooner's position for that day, and then and not till then
relieved Disko of the quadrant. There is an etiquette in all these
things.

The said "hog-yoke," an Eldridge chart, the farming almanac,
Blunt's "Coast Pilot," and Bowditch's "Navigator" were all the
weapons Disko needed to guide him, except the deep-sea lead that
was his spare eye. Harvey nearly slew Penn with it when Tom Platt
taught him first how to "fly the blue pigeon"; and, though his
strength was not equal to continuous sounding in any sort of a
sea, for calm weather with a seven-pound lead on shoal water Disko
used him freely. As Dan said: "'Tain't soundin's dad wants. It's
samples. Grease her up good, Harve." Harvey would tallow the cup
at the end, and carefully bring the sand, shell, sludge, or
whatever it might be, to Disko, who fingered and smelt it and gave
judgment. As has been said, when Disko thought of cod he thought
as a cod; and by some long-tested mixture of instinct and
experience, moved the "We're Here" from berth to berth, always
with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen
board.

But Disko's board was the Grand Bank - a triangle two hundred and
fifty miles on each side a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with