Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 20.pdf/202

 THE CAPTAIN OF THE LAUNCH horse; "I will acknowledge one thing, Judge. You recall about twenty minutes ago when those big waves were breaking over the poop? Well, the hatches were battened down, but they were not entirely water-tight. If a few more of those waves had struck us, the water would have gotten in the engine room and put out the fires, and, while we would have come through all right in the end, I'll admit that for a while we'd have been out of luck." Think of it, kind reader! Twenty miles out at sea, off a cape as dangerous as Hatteras, in a sixty-foot launch sadly needing repair, in a heavy gale, with the fire in the engines out! And yet this young scrapegrace having the impudence to grin at us and admit that if certain additional calamities had happened, we would, for a while, have been "out of luck!" This re-incarnation of Mark Tapley then told us that when he had gone up the coast a day or two before, he had met with

much worse weather than on this trip; that during the worst of it, the native crew had abandoned their several posts and gathered around the capstan to concen trate all their energies in panic-stricken prayer. Whereupon he had picked up a belaying pin and hit one of them in the head with it, knocking him down. By this means, together with a promise of like treatment for the rest in the event of dis obedience, he made them return to their several posts of duty. At the time, and until the emergency was over, he did not know or worry about whether the man he had struck was dead or not. However, it turned out that he had only been knocked senseless, and was not seriously hurt. It is hardly necessary to add that in our travels around the circuit of the First Judicial District, we did not again avail ourselves of the hospitality of the captain of the Quartermaster's launch. Macon, Georgia, February, 1908.