Page:At the Fall of Port Arthur.djvu/63

Rh and Jeff prepared an entirely new dinner for all hands.

"You must keep close watch on all of the men," said the captain to Larry and Grandon, when quietness had been restored. "Semmel was the worst of the lot, but I do not like the way Peterson and one or two others are acting."

"I don't see what they can do," answered Larry.

"They might start a mutiny," came from the first mate.

"Would they dare go as far as that?"

"Sometimes sailors get strange notions, and the old Harry himself can't stop them," said Captain Ponsberry. "A thing that in itself doesn't amount to much will start them off, and they'll imagine that everything is going wrong. When I was a lad, on board the Mary Eliza, Captain Snapper, we had a mutiny just because the coffee wasn't right."

"Yes, and I can remember that they had a mutiny on the old brig Chesterfield because Captain Roe's wife brought a cross-eyed yellow cat on board," added Grandon. "Not a man would hoist a sail until that feline was put ashore. And when, two months later, the brig lost her foremast in a gale, the sailors said it was on account of that same cat, she having scratched the mast before she was taken away!"