When Captain Scraggs, after abandoning all hope of salving the bark _Chesapeake_, returned to the _Maggie_, the little craft reminded him of nothing so much as the ward for the incorrigible of an insane asylum. Due to Captain Scraggs's stupidity and the general inefficiency of the _Maggie_, the new navigating officer was of the opinion that he had been swindled out of his share of the salvage, while the new engineer, furious at having been engaged to baby such a ruin as the _Maggie's_ boiler turned out to be, blamed Scraggs's parsimony for the loss of _his_ share of the salvage. Therefore, both men aired with the utmost frankness their opinion of their employer; even Neils Halvorsen was peeved. Their depression and rage was nothing, however, compared with that of Captain Scraggs's. He had recklessly jettisoned approximately two hundred dollars' worth of vegetables; indeed the loss might go higher, for all he knew. Also, he had lost his skiff, and McGuffey and Gibney had practically blackmailed him out of forty dollars. Then, to cap the climax, he had been forced to abandon two thousand dollars to his enemies; and as the _Maggie_ crept north at three knots an hour the knowledge that he must, even against his desires, install a new boiler, overwhelmed him to such an extent that he found it impossible to submit silently to the nagging of the navigating officer. One word borrowed another until diplomatic relations were severed and, in the language of the classic, they "mixed it." They were fairly well matched, and, to the credit of Captain Scraggs be it said, whenever he believed himself to have a fighting chance Scraggs would fight and fight well, under the Tom-cat rules of fisticuffs. Following a bloody battle in the pilot house, he subdued the mate; following his victory he was still war mad, so he went to the engine-room hatch and abused the engineer. As a result of the day's events, both men quit when the _Maggie_ was tied up at Jackson Street wharf and once more Captain Scraggs was helpless. In his extremity, he wished he hadn't been so hard on Mr. Gibney and McGuffey, for he realized he could never hope to get them back until their salvage money should be spent. He had other tortures in addition. He could not afford to await the construction of a new boiler, for if he did some other skipper would cut in on the vegetable trade he had worked up, for vegetables, being perishable, could not lie on the dock at Halfmoon Bay longer than forty-eight hours. It behooved Scraggs, therefore, to place an order for the new boiler and, in the meantime, to get a gang down aboard the _Maggie_ immediately and put in at least ten new tubes. By working night and day this job might be accomplished in forty-eight hours, and, fortunately, Sunday intervened. Scraggs shuddered at thought of the expense, for in addition to being parsimonious he had very little ready cash on hand and no credit.