Thus, in time, he had
acquired a reputation for being unreliable and a wind-bag, with
the result that skippers were chary of engaging him. Not to be
too prolix, at the time Captain Scraggs made the disheartening
discovery that he had to have a skipper for the _Maggie_, Mr.
Gibney found himself reduced to the alternative of longshore work
or a fo'castle berth in a windjammer bound for blue water.
With alacrity, therefore, Mr. Gibney had accepted Scraggs's offer
of seventy-five dollars a month--"and found"--to skipper the
_Maggie_ on her coastwise run. As a first mate of steam he had no
difficulty inducing the Inspectors to grant him a license to
skipper such an abandoned craft as the _Maggie_, and accordingly
he hung up his ticket in her pilot house and was registered as
her master, albeit, under a gentlemen's agreement, with Scraggs
he was not to claim the title of captain and was known to the
world as the _Maggie's_ first mate, second mate, third mate,
quartermaster, purser, and freight clerk. One Neils Halvorsen, a
solemn Swede with a placid, bovine disposition, constituted the
fo'castle hands, while Bart McGuffey, a wastrel of the Gibney
type but slower-witted, reigned supreme in the engine room.
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