ready for them. Come on here, you men.” He named over his depleted watch and herded it forward. He herded it down to his cabin and nourished it with stimulants.
“We may coil the right rope, at that,” the Semitic man suggested. “Major Ayers ought to know something about boats: it should be in his British blood.”
Major Ayers didn’t think so. “American boats have amphibious traits that are lacking in ours,” he explained. “Half the voyage on land, you know,” he explained tediously.
“Sure,” Fairchild agreed. He brought his watch above again and forward, where instinct told him the ropes should be. “I wonder where the captain is. Surely he ain’t drowned, do you reckon?”
“I guess not,” the Semitic man answered. “He gets paid for this. . . . There comes a boat.”
The boat came from the tug, and soon it came alongside and the captain came over the rail. A stranger followed him and they went below without haste, leaving Mrs. Maurier’s words like vain unmated birds in the air. “Let’s get ready, then,” Fairchild ordered his crew. “Let’s tie a rope to something.”
So they tied a rope to something, knotting it intricately, then Major Ayers discovered that they had tied it to a winch handle which fitted loosely into a socket and which would probably come out quite easily, once a strain came onto the rope. So they untied it and found something attached firmly to the deck, and they tied the rope to this, and after a while the captain and the stranger, clutching a short evil pipe, came back on deck and stood and watched them. “We’ve got the right rope,” Fairchild told his watch in an undertone, and they knotted the rope intricately and straightened up.
“How’s that, Cap?” Fairchild asked.
“All right,” the captain answered. “Can we trouble you for a match?”
