Wide Courses. James B. Connolly

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      "Never mind what yard it was, son. And I'll name no names, either, and then by no accident will there be a general court-martial coming to me some day. There were three of four other ships fitting out at the same time, and after a while these other three ships got their stores aboard and proceeded to sea, leaving a lot of old gear behind them on the dock.

      "We were making ready to pipe water into our ship, when Mr. Kiley, our boson, always a forehanded chap, thought it all a pity to have to use our bran-new hose for that kind of work. You all know how hose gets lying chafing around with people stepping on it, carts and wagons running over it, coal-dust grinding into it, and so on. A pity, our boson thought, to subject our nice new hose to that kind of abuse, when in the condemned heap on the dock there was a length of hose that would do the work, and he put it up to Mr. Renner, the officer of the deck at the time.

      "Now Mr. Renner was a new-made ensign, and we all of us here been long enough in the service to know how it is about a middy that's just got his commission. We all know how it is with ourselves when we first get our C.P.O.—except you, Reggie, and you'll get yours some day. Am I right? Sure I am. If there's one thing on earth [pg 22] we're going to do then, it's to live up to regulations.

      "No, we'll never again remember so much about rules and regulations as we do then. No catching us in anything irregular; no sir. And so with Mr. Renner, the new-made ensign. He brings out the blue-book and shows the boson. 'Look,' he says. 'Paragraph fourteen thousand four hundred and forty-two,' or whatever it was. 'Hose,' he goes on to read, 'is expendible property, to be surveyed and wiped off the property-books by condemning to the scrap-heap and sold in the open market to the highest bidder. There,' says our new-made ensign to our boson, 'what it says. And according to that, the admiral himself couldn't take that hose from that scrap-heap without authority. No, not if it was no more than an old shoe-lace, he couldn't.'

      "'But that won't fill our water-tanks, and I'd like to use that hose, sir,' says the boson.

      "'M-m!' says Mr. Renner. 'M-m! now if Mr. Shinn was aboard—' Mr. Shinn was our executive. 'But Mr. Shinn is ashore. However, I'll tell you what; I will speak to the captain about it,' and he steps inside the bulkhead and writes a message to the skipper.

      He brings out the blue-book and shows the boson

      "Now our skipper was a good old soul, and thought a lot of his boson, and wanted to do everything [pg 23] he could to help him out, but also, like a good many other good old captains in the service, he'd forgotten a lot of this stuff about regulations. Ordinarily—say, if 'twas anything to be done out to sea—he'd have said, 'Why, of course, Kiley; go ahead and do it,' But this was in a navy yard, ashore, and when he gets a note with something about regulations in it, he begins to haul to.

      "And many a good sea-going old skipper is bluffed the same way about anything that spells regulations, you betcher. So now our good old skipper begins to tumble his hair and pull his moustache and look again at Mr. Renner's note. At last he tells the messenger to say to Mr. Renner that he will look into it and let him know.

      "Another hour of studying, and the captain calls in his new yeoman that—"

      "Was that you, Dallie?"

      "Never mind—and cut out the personal questions, Reggie son. And remember you don't rate any more questions than anybody else here. I'm telling you the story, and I'll tell all that's good for you and just the way it happened.

      "Now if this yeoman had been better acquainted with his skipper, he'd have been of some use just then. He might have suggested, in a way any of us can at times without interfering, or jarring an officer, even as topsided as a captain, how the thing [pg 24] could be fixed up without any correspondence game. But this new yeoman hadn't yet learned what his captain's steaming radius was. And the captain, having regulations on his brain and not getting the hint at the psychological time, he dictates a regulation communication to the commandant of the yard, which the new yeoman frames up just as he was told. It was a letter inquiring of the commandant the status of the condemned hose in question, and could it not be loaned for temporary use, to be returned in due season—say, next day? and so forth.

      "Now the commandant was a good old soul, too, and nothing would have pleased him better than to accommodate his old friend and classmate, the captain of the Savannah; but seeing this thing come to him in such formal style, and himself being just off a three-years' cruise, and always a little doubtful about these port regulations, anyway, and wanting to do things up in a seaman-like way, he turns to his chief clerk and says, 'What do we do about this?'

      "Now what the commandant meant and what he would have said, if he'd put it in more words, was: 'I want the Savannah to have the use of that condemned hose, but I suppose there are certain formalities to be observed, and your business is to know what these formalities are. Here, you attend [pg 25] to these formalities, but see that the Savannah gets the use of the hose.' That's about how he would have put it aboard ship, but he hadn't quite savvied this shore-going chief clerk at his elbow. Toward him he didn't have that same sea-going feeling that he'd have toward one of his old ship's crew.

      "And the chief clerk wasn't the kind that lost sleep trying to make trouble for anybody; but he was the combination of being twenty-five years on one job and having a manager of a wife—an upstanding, marine-sergeant sort of a woman, with the beam and bows of a battleship, and an eye—oh, an eye!—and the chief clerk and his missus, they'd just finished paying for their house over in the city, and they'd had to scrimp and scrape for the Lord knows how many years to get it paid for, and there was a marriageable daughter to provide for, and his wife never let him forget that he mustn't risk their real estate or jeopardize his job or the marrying prospects of the daughter, who was just getting to where she was making a lot of desirable acquaintances. There was a young staff officer, a passed assistant surgeon, within easy range, and there was a young paymaster above the horizon, and no telling but they might yet capture one of the line, and that was all the old lady needed to be happy. But if papa was shifted to another [pg 26] city, they'd have to sell the house at a sacrifice and start making friends, all over again. They say that the chief clerk used to get his instructions every morning like it was the uniform of the day. Above all things he must never do anything that the department or any superior officer could ever censure him for.

      "He was a little man, the chief clerk, with an upturned moustache he was always flattening fan-wise. 'Heels' they used to call him at the yard, because he was so sensitive about his height that he wore regular female opera-singer's heels on his shoes. Some said his wife made him wear them. Even then he only came up to the top of her ear. Well, Heels considers things now, and recollecting that this would come under the jurisdiction of the captain of the yard, and that the captain of the yard had his little spells, he says to the commandant, 'I think, sir, we'll have to refer it.'

      "'Refer it? To who?'

      "'To the captain of the yard, sir.'

      "'Captain of the—D'y' mean the Savannah can't use that bit of rotten old hose without authority?'

      "'Well, sir, you see it is like this. You see, sir, I have to do things the way they are laid down for me. The Savannah could, perhaps, use that section of hose, especially if you say so, sir, but—'

      [pg 27]

      "'But what?'

      "'But if, sir, the captain of the yard should learn it, as he might, sir, and he should feel slighted, or if an inspector should happen along when it was in use, and discover СКАЧАТЬ