Pete smiled genially.
"This'll put hair on yer teeth, eh, Cap'n, this will," he said, while
from the galley below floated Arthur's voice in a deep sea chanty:
"I'll go no more a-roaming,
No more a-ro-o-o-a-ming with you, fair maid."
"Go on back to harbor, you little lobster pot; we'll take care of the
wreck."
The corpulent captain of the great wrecking tug _Sovereign_, lying
outside the breakers off Jones Inlet, megaphoned this insult to the
deck of the _Fledgling_, as she drew near the scene of the wreck,
rising and falling on the waves like a piece of driftwood.
It was a deadly day. The promise of the sunlight had waned with the
earlier hours, and heavy blue-black clouds palled the heavens. Not one
hundred yards apart lay the two tugs, rolling and pitching in the
seaway; the _Fledgling_ trim and stanch, the _Sovereign_ big and
cumbersome, the funnel belching thunderclouds of sepia, her derrick
booms creaking and rattling and slatting infernally.
Straight on ahead, where the line of swelling waves burst into
breakers, where the spume sang like whip-lashes, and where the whine of
the wind tore itself into a nasty snarl, lay the wreck of the schooner
_Zeitgeist_. She lay half on her side and the waves licked up and over
the faded gray hull, completing the work that time already had begun.
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