“How far out do we go?” Patricia asked.
“Sea buoy,” Griffin said. “Last one out there, about a mile.” He got up and opened the small door going forward, and the sound of the big marine engine increased. “Just keep her on course, Skipper,” he called back, grinning over his shoulder. In a moment he emerged with a trolling rod and a big reel. He set them up, attached a white feather jig to the leader, and began paying out line.
“All right,” he called, “who wants to catch the first mackerel?”
“Ladies first,” Reno said.
Griffin took the wheel and throttled the engine back to slow trolling speed. Patricia settled into the seat at the rear of the cockpit and held the rod. In a few minutes she had a strike, but lost the fish. She landed the next one, a mackerel slightly over a foot long.
Reno enjoyed watching her. Any other time the cruise would have been fun and he would have been reluctant to see it end, but now he was conscious of a gnawing impatience to get back.
He took out cigarettes and offered Griffin one. “This pilot on his way down on a ship now?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Griffin craned his neck, looking astern. Then he glanced at his watch. “Should be showing any time now. Said he’d be down to the bar around ten.”
“Don’t the pilots have a boat of their own?” Reno asked curiously.
“Yes, but it’s in for overhaul. When they go to the yard they give most of the business to me. I usually use one of the tugs, but thought I’d try this one today, since it’s smooth out here.”
In another twenty minutes the ship was in sight astern. Patricia reeled in her line while Griffin advanced throttle and changed course to intersect the ship’s course as it cleared the sea buoy. They came up alongside and Reno could see the name. It was the SS Silver Bay. His eyes narrowed reflectively. Wasn’t that the one—? No, he remembered. The one Counsel had been on was the Silver Cape. It must be the same line, however. Probably all named Silver something.
They bumped against the side. In a moment he heard the rattle of a Jacob’s ladder and the pilot stepped down onto the foredeck of the cruiser. He slid around the’ outside of the cabin and dropped into the cockpit.
Griffin introduced them with a sweeping wave of the hand as he advanced the throttle and spun the wheel to break contact with the ship. “Breaking in a new crew, Cap,” he called over his shoulder.
Captain Shevlin was a salty little gamecock with a merry eye. He regarded Patricia Devers appreciatively. “Smartest-looking deckhand you ever had. I’m going to sign her on the pilot boat.”
It developed almost immediately he was a talker with an almost unstoppable flow of awesome language. He sat down, pushed back the battered felt hat with its turned-up brim, stuck a long cigar in his mouth, and set sail on an enchanting voyage of reminiscence, which ranged from typhoons in the Indian Ocean to water-front brawls in Liverpool, and from torpedoings in the First World War to intrigues with Oriental dancing girls, all of it delivered in highly pungent language and with an incomparable gift for imagery.
It was interrupted only twice in fifteen miles. Once, as they passed the Griffin dock, Hutch looked back over his shoulder and laughed. “You see why they call him Silent Shevlin?” he asked Reno. Then he broke in on the flow of words. “Say, Cap, I’m going all the way in to town to have a couple of things on here looked at in the boat yard. You want to stay aboard, or get off and catch the bus?”
“I’ll stay aboard,” Captain Shevlin waved an offhand paw. Then he turned back to Patricia. “Now, where was I? Oh, yes. So I says to the Mate, ‘Go down there and tell . . .”
Reno forgot some of his impatience in listening. As they came up past the dredge they met a small tug coming down towing two deep-laden oil barges. One of the barges was swinging, and Griffin had to back down quickly and pull in behind the dredge to avoid collision.
Captain Shevlin bounded up in the cockpit, cupped his hands, and yelled across to the towboat captain. “Hey, Ernie, why don’t you keep steerageway on that bedpan? You think you’re herding cows to pasture, or something?”
The towman waved good-naturedly. “Relax, Cap. You’re flipping your lid.”
They eased out from behind the dredge and proceeded around the next bend of the channel, which opened into the half-mile reach below the highway. “Always something,” Captain Shevlin complained bitterly. “You know, a man that’d pilot on this channel for a living when he could just as easy have been a pimp or a one-legged panhandler must enjoy torturing himself.”
Patricia looked at Reno and laughed, and the Captain shook his head with the unmistakable and dreamy expression that signaled another story. “It reminds me, Hutch, of one night this spring, right in this exact spot. I was bringing one of the Silver line ships up—and that was a trip to land you in the Happy Ward.
“When I climbed aboard out on the bar I landed right in the middle of a fight. Two of the stewards had got gassed up on paint-thinner or compass alcohol or something and was trying to choke each other’s eyeballs out in a tangle in the forward well deck and the poor Mate was running around unscrambling ‘em.
“Well, they finally get things quieted down and we start up, and everything is fine except the Old Man has to stay on the bridge and has the Third Mate up there, and the Second Mate, and would have had the Mate and bosun except they had brains enough to stay on the fo’c’sle head where they belonged. And the helmsman was one of them correspondence-school AB’s that didn’t know his foot from his elbow, and every time I’d tell him to ease the helm he’d steady her up.
“It’s as black as the inside of a blind muley-cow, and just about the time we make the swing right here and start readying her up on the next range it starts to pour rain. Then I spot running lights poking out from that next bend above here, and remembered there was a Mid-Gulf tanker due to come down loaded about that time. You know how they are, loaded, sway-bellied and dragging bottom all the way. They’re drawing thirty feet by the time they get through filling everything on board, and they need all the room they can get in this channel.
“Well, we both get lined out on the ranges and we’re only about six hundred yards apart and closing fast and the Old Man and I are hanging over the port wing of the bridge trying to see enough of the tanker’s running-lights through the rain to tell whether we’re lined up red-to-red or whether we’re about to run between ‘em, when right here about a hundred yards south of this Number Fourteen buoy there is the damnedest ker-splash you ever heard, right under us. Sounds like at least two men have fallen overboard.
“So of course the same thought hits everybody right at the same time. It’s them two chowder-headed messboys at it again.
“Well, Captain Wilbur starts to wave his arms and foam out orders like a soda fire-extinguisher.
“ ‘Cap,’ I says, ‘if you think I’m going to lose steerage-way on this bucket with a hundred and fifty thousand barrels of high-test gas booming down on us just because your pot-wallopers are throwing each other over the side, you’re as nutty as I am. Steady as she goes.’
“So, by God, when we get out of the bind he sends somebody down to see which one threw the other over the side, and I’m damned if they’re not both still there.”
Griffin looked back over his shoulder at them. “What ship did you say that was, Cap?” he asked casually.
“Hell, I can’t remember, Hutch. Silver Line, anyway.”
Reno had started to light a cigarette. He held the match now, and stared thoughtfully out across the water, conscious of something that had disturbed his thoughts. Then he shrugged. Whatever it was had gone now. Windy old character, he thought amiably, looking at Shevlin again.