Captain Cammock secured his guns, returned his powder, and piped the boat to be cleared. The hen-coop was lashed down for a full due below the break of the poop. After the meat had been hung in the harness-room, the hands went forward to loaf and stand-by. The two friends walked the poop with Cammock, ten paces and a turn, talking of old times, and of the fortune of the sea. They were waiting for the ebb-tide to take them out. The wind was fair, but light; they needed the ebb. Waiting like that is always a weariness. Captain Margaret wished that he had never put in to Salcombe. He was a fool, he thought. The thing was over, the wound was closed. He had begun it anew; reopened it. Now he had to apply the cautery. If he had held his course, his ship would have been out of sight of land, going on, under all sail, forty miles south-west from Scilly, bringing him nearer to content at each wave, each bubble. He felt also the discontent of the tide-bound sailor. He felt that he was at liberty wrongfully; that it was wrong for him to be there, doing nothing, merely because the tide still flowed. Perrin, though he was eager to talk to his friend about the results of the farewell call, was bored to death by the inaction, by the sudden stoppage of the routine. As for Cammock, he smoked his pipe, and looked out to windward, wondering inwardly at the strangeness of gentlemen. Thinking that they were hipped, he told them his favourite tale of how the cow came at him one time, when he was hunting for beef near One Bush Key. It was an exciting story; but nothing, he said, to what “happened him” one time when he was loading live steers at Negril, after the cattle pest at Antigua. “So I got into one of the shore-boats,” he concluded. “I’d had enough of them great horns a yard long.” “Every man to his trade,” said Perrin curtly. Captain Margaret asked if the long-horns were bred from imported stock. Cammock had expected them to laugh. The situation was saved by the entrance of a sixth-rate, under all plain sail, on the last of the flood. Her blue sides were gay with gold leaf; her colours streamed out astern; she broke the water to a sparkle. In her main-chains stood a leadsman crying his melancholy cry of “And a half, three,” which another voice repeated harshly. Though she came quietly she came swiftly; for the flood had strength. She was a lovely thing, swaying in there softly. The _Broken Heart_ saluted her. The friends watched her as she passed. Cammock saw his opportunity. He turned to his companions. “What d’ye make of her?” he asked them. Perrin called her “a man-of-war”; Margaret “a beautiful thing.”