his departure occasioned no heartache.

"We'll board at the mill cook-house until we're loaded, Mike," Matt
Peasley informed the mate. "They have a good Chink up there."

Mr. Murphy sighed as he loaded his pipe and struck a match for it.

"It does look to me, sir," he replied, with that touch of conscious
superiority so noticeable in the Celt, "as though Cappy Ricks might
have slipped this cargo to a Dutchman."

The Retriever commenced taking on cargo at seven o'clock the following
morning, with Mr. Murphy on shipboard and Matt Peasley on the dock
superintending the gang of stevedores. Ordinarily the masters of
lumber freighters ship their crews before commencing to load, in order
that sailors at forty dollars a month may obviate the employment of an
equal number of stevedores at forty cents an hour; but Mr. Murphy, out
of his profound experience, advised against this course, as tending to
spread the news of the Retriever's misfortune and militate against
securing a crew when the vessel should be loaded and lying in the
stream ready for sea. Men employed now, he explained, would only
desert. The thing to do was to let a Seattle crimp furnish the crew,
sign them on before the shipping commissioner in Seattle, bring them
aboard drunk, tow to sea, and let the rascals make the best of a bad
bargain.

The hold was about half filled, and the ship carpenters were at work
cutting ports in the Retriever's bows, when Matt Peasley discovered
that the mill did not have in hand any order for lumber to be used as
stowage to snug up the cumbersome cargo below decks and keep it from