The officer on the bridge took off his cap with immense politeness. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I’ve asked for my reckoning. If the agricultural person with the hair will kindly shut his head, the sea-green barnacle with the walleye may per‑haps condescend to enlighten us.”
“Naow you’ve made a show o’ me, Salters,” said Disko, angrily. He could not stand up to that particular sort of talk, and snapped out the latitude and longitude without more lectures.
“Well, that’s a boatload of lunatics, sure,” said the skipper, as he rang up the engine-room and tossed a bundle of newspapers into the schooner.
“Of all the blamed fools, next to you, Salters, him an’ his crowd are abaout the likeliest I’ve ever seen,” said Disko as the We’re Here slid away. “I was jest givin’ him my jedgment on lullsikin’ round these waters like a lost child, an’ you must cut in with your fool farmin’. Can’t ye never keep things sep’rate?”
Harvey, Dan, and the others stood back, winking one to the other and full of joy; but Disko and Salters wrangled seriously till evening, Salters arguing that a cattle-boat was practically a barn on blue water, and Disko insisting that, even if this were the case, decency and fisher-pride demanded that he should have kept “things sep’rate.” Long Jack stood it in silence for a time—an angry skipper makes an unhappy crew—and then he spoke across the table after supper:
“Fwhat’s the good o’ bodderin’ fwhat they’ll say?” said he.
“They’ll tell that tale agin us fer years—that’s all,” said Disko. “Oil-cake sprinkled!”
“With salt, o’ course,” said Salters, impenitent, reading the farming reports from a week-old New York paper.
“It’s plumb mortifyin’ to all my feelin’s,” the skipper went on.