Blow the Man Down - A Romance of the Coast

Then came some of the ocean aristocrats to join the humbler guests in

that tavern of the seas.

Avant couriers of a metropolitan yacht club, on its annual cruise,

arrived, jockeying in with billowing mountains of snowy canvas spread to

catch the last whispers of the breeze. Later arrivals, after the breeze

failed, were towed in by the smart motor craft of the fleet. One by one,

as the anchors splashed, brass cannons barked salute and were answered

by the commodore's gun.

Captain Candage sat on the edge of the Polly's house and snapped

an involuntary and wrathful wink every time a cannon banged. In that

hill-bound harbor, where the fog had massed, every noise was magnified

as by a sounding-board. There were cheery hails, yachtsmen bawled over

the mist-gemmed brass rails interchange of the day's experiences, and

frisking yacht tenders, barking staccato exhausts, began to carry men to

and fro on errands of sociability. In the silences Captain Candage could

hear the popping of champagne corks.

"Them fellers certainly live high and sleep in the garret," observed

Oakum Otie. He was seated cross-legged on the top of the house and was

hammering down the lumps in a freshly twisted eye-splice with the end of

a marlinespike.

"It has always been a wonder to me," growled Captain Candage, "how dudes

who don't seem to have no more wit than them fellows haw-hawing over

there, and swigging liquor by the cart-load, ever make money the way

they do so as to afford all this."

On that point Captain Candage might have found Mate McGaw of the

Olenia willing to engage in profitable discussion and amicable

understanding!

"They don't make it-they don't know enough to make it," stated Otie,

with the conviction of a man who knew exactly what he was talking about.

"It has all been left to 'em by their fathers."

The bearded and brown men of the apple-tree crews leaned the patched

elbows of their old coats on the rails and gloomily surveyed the

conviviality on board the plaything crafts. Remarks which they exchanged

with one another were framed to indicate a sort of lofty scorn for these

frolickers of the sea. The coasting skippers, most of whom wore hard

hats, as if they did not want to be confounded with those foppish yacht

captains, patrolled their quarter-decks and spat disdainfully over their

rails.

Everlastingly there was the clank of pumps on board the Apple-treers,

and the pumps were tackling the everlasting leaks. Water reddened

by contact with bricks, water made turbid by percolation through

paving-blocks, splashed continuously from hiccuping scuppers.