to and fro to take sure aim. But the engineer had thrown in his clutch and the speed boat foamed off before the captain got the range, and he was too thrifty to heave a perfectly good marlinespike after a target he could not hit, angry as he was.
The girl faced her father. There was no doubting her mood. She was a rebel. Indignation set up its flaming standards on her cheeks, and the signal-flames of combat sparkled in her eyes.
“How did you dare to do such a thing to me—those gentlemen looking on? Father, have you lost your mind?”
Otie expressed the opinion tinder his breath that the captain, on the contrary, had “lost his number.”
Otie's superior officer was stamping around the quarterdeck, kicking at loose objects, and avoiding his daughter's resentful gaze. There was a note of insincerity in his bluster, as if he wanted to hide embarrassment in a cloud of his own vaporings, as a squid colors water when it fears capture.
“After this you call me Cap'n Candage,” he commanded. “After this I'm Cap'n Candage on the high seas, and I propose to run my own quarter-deck. And when I let a crowd of dudes traipse on board here to peek and spy and grin and flirt with you, you'll have clamshells for finger-nails. Now, my lady, I don't want any back talk!”
“But I am going to talk to you, father!”
“Remember that I'm a Candage, and back talk—”
“So am I a Candage—and I have just been ashamed of it!”
“I'm going to have discipline on my own quarterdeck.”
“Back talk, quarter-deck discipline, calling you captain! Fol-de-rol and fiddlesticks! I'm your own daughter and you're my father. And you have brought us both to shame! There! I don't want to stay on this old hulk, and I'm not going to stay. I am going home to Aunt Zilpah.”
“I had made up my mind to let you go. My temper was mild and sweet till those jeehoofered, gold-trimmed sons of a striped—”
“Father!”
“I had made up my mind
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