Adventure Magazine Cover — page 98: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

84 don’t know what that is, either?” asked Day, as the boy stood, his whole attitude one of question. Well, it’s painting the smoke-stack by moonlight. S Hasty Day was a wonder at handling recruits. His words were as sharp as knives, but they pared away only the outer crust and left the heart unhurt. In- stinctively Saltsman knew that here was a man who would tell him just what he wanted to know about this new, strange business and with his scathing tongue would put him right when he went wrong. The Alta was on her maiden voyage with a cargo of barreled oil for an English port. Her skipper, first lieutenant and navigator were merchant seamen serving in the Naval Reserve, and in addition to this deck force she had two ensigns from the Pelham Bay school. Her crew, made up of the different —required branches, had been sent aboard her from a training station only three days before she sailed. Most of them were young and enthusiastically eager in their new job, but depressingly green, as far as knowledge of it went. The first week out, as if to haze the can- didates, there swept down across the Grand Banks the best half of a northwest gale, raking the deep laden ship with great green seas that slapped over the battened hatches and whirled and raced up the gang- ways to plunge in foaming cataracts over the wallowing sides. The Alia groaned and pitched and rolled as if she, too, new to the job, were taking a beginner’s lesson. The crew, having lost interest in the palatable concoctions of Tony Ravellotti, the cook, stood unsteadily on the boat- deck or lay in their bunks near convenient deck buckets. The officers and old-timers stood the watches. Bob Woten, the chief yeoman, had the wheel, and Hasty Day came up torelieve him. “Course is three hundred and forty de- grees,” said Woten, ‘‘and the old girl’s making a trail like a yeomanette’s first shorthand—carrying half a turn left wheel. Guess who I relieved, Hasty? Old Salty, the farm-hand wonder. Had the wheel sripped like the handles of a plow, but hanging on and keeping near enough on the course to get by. ‘Hello, old Salty,’ I says to him. ‘How’s tricks?’ He just grins at me and points to the course chalked up there on the weather board. Adventure ‘““*Where you going?’ I asks him, but he didn’t answer, having other business at the lee rail. Pretty soon he comes staggering back. ““T’ve had ’em from green apples, and from too much watermelon, and going in swimming after I et, but this here is kinder different,’ he confided to me. ‘Does a man ever get over it?’ “Surel’ I told him. ‘All you have to do is to catch a dolphin, get Tony to fry the liver with some onions, and eat that. Then you’ll be all set.’ “He thanked me and went after a fish- line. Can you beat it?” “That'll be enough talking, you two,” said Ben Hoskins, the watch officer, coming out of the chart-room, where he had been figuring a time-sight. “T WONDER sometimes,” said the a captain, joining a discussion at the === mess table, “why some of these =e from inland parts of the country quit the job they know and take up the sea.”’ The three days’ storm had blown itself out and the recruits had settled back into a more normal routine. “IT can tell you why one of them came, sir,’ said Bert Hardin, looking solemnly across the table at Matthew Cates, the other Pelham Bay ensign. “His name is Orion and, being named for a star, he wants to study navigation.”’ “He'd better begin lower down than the stars,” said the captain. “He is,” said Clinton Nacke, the first lieutenant. ‘The bunch is breaking him in on swab combs and writing letters to be left in mail buoys, and have had him up at night holding a light at the gangway to see if he could catch a flying fish, with the ship already in forty north and getting in a higher latitude every watch. They’ve tried every stunt on him that any of the gang knows, and so far he hasn’t failed to fall for a one of them. I expect to find him on the masthead any time keeping a look- out for sea-serpents.”’ So active were his shipmates in Salts- man’s education that there came a time when they had to let up on him, not because he had ceased to take their pranks with patient fortitude, but because they had tried out all they knew on him and could think of few new ones. “Old Salty’s getting wised up,” confided Gomichooks: co