Instinctively he began to look about the cabin for a barometer.
Already that day the Olenia's glass had warned him by its downward
tendency. He wondered whether further reading would indicate something
more ominous than fog.
Across the cabin he noted some sort of an instrument swinging from a
hook on a carline. He investigated. It was a makeshift barometer, the
advertising gift of a yeast company. The contents of its tube were
roiled to the height of the mark which was lettered "Tornado."
"You can't tell nothing from that!" Captain Candage had come down into
the cabin and stood behind his involuntary guest. "It has registered
'Tornado' ever since the glass got cracked. And even at that, it's about
as reliable as any of the rest of them tinkerdiddle things."
"Haven't you a regular barometer--an aneroid?" inquired Captain Mayo.
"I can smell all the weather I need to without bothering with one of
them contrivances," declared the master of the schooner, in lordly
manner. He began to pull dirty oilskins out of a locker.
Mayo hurried up the companionway and put out his head. There were both
weight and menace in the wind which hooted past his ears. The fog was
gone, but the night was black, without glimmer of stars. The white
crests of the waves which galloped alongside flaked the darkness with
ominous signalings.
"If you can smell weather, Captain Candage, your nose ought to tell you
that this promises to be something pretty nasty."
"Oh, it might be called nasty by lubbers on a gingerbread yacht, but
I have sailed the seas in my day and season, and I don't run for an
inshore puddle every time the wind whickers a little." He was fumbling
with a button under his crisp roll of chin beard and gave the other man
a stare of superiority.
"You don't class me with yacht-lubbers, do you?"
"Well, you was just on a yacht, wasn't you?"
"Look here, Captain Candage, you may just as well understand, now and
here, that I'm one of your kind of sailors. Excuse me for personal
talk, but I want to inform you that from fifteen to twenty I was a
Grand-Banksman. Last season I was captain of the beam trawler Laura and
Marion. And I have steamboated in the Sound and have been a first mate
in the hard-pine trade in Southern waters. I have had a chance to find
out more or less about weather."
"Un-huh!" remarked the skipper, feigning indifference. "What about it?"