“Did they or did they not tell us he knew his job?” “Right! Knows this ship as you know the way to your mouth.” “Yah! Knows what she can do on the Japan route. But this, gentlemen and ladies, ain’t the road to Manila. And do you know what? This here is Captain Gillies’s first trip to Alaska!” Gedge brought it out with a sledge-hammer effect. The audience felt they were expected to be dumfounded. They complied. But a voice was heard: “It’s most people’s first trip to Alaska.” “I tell you,” said Gedge, judicially, “he knows as little about these northern seas as that boy there with the banjer.” “This self-appointed judge,” Cheviot’s voice rose steadily above the growing murmur, “hasn’t heard apparently that _nobody_ knows these waters.” “Would you mind repeatin’ that, sir?” “Not at all. In the first place, the Bering is a practically uncharted sea. That may be a disgrace to our Coast Survey, but it’s hardly the captain’s fault.” Gedge looked stumped for a moment. If this were true it wouldn’t do for him not to know it. Cheviot was making good the diversion in the captain’s favor, when Gedge interrupted: “Does the captain’s friend pretend to say that the whalers and sealers and fellers who’ve been up here before gold was thought of—that none o’ _them_ don’t know enough to keep off a damned sand-bank?” Looking his wiliest: “Now, if we had one o’ them sort here—” Then, with a highly effective coup: “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” “Here on this ship?” “Right here on board the _Los Angeles_!” “Where? Who, who? Name?” Everybody but Cheviot and a few women were shouting themselves hoarse. “What y’ got to say to that, Mr.— You, there, with the arctic cap and the tender heart fur captains?” “I’ve got this to say. That even the men who sailed along here last fall, don’t know Norton Sound this summer.” “_Wot?_” “Can’t know it.” “And why not?” “For the good reason that new sand-bars are formed up here every spring. Not a ship that sails for any port on the northwest coast but goes on what’s practically an exploring expedition. That’s our true danger. The captain’s no less than ours.” “Oh, yes, we all know you’re in with his nibs, but what my friends don’t know is that Billings & Co. sent a pilot aboard this ship.” “Why, then,” roared half-a-dozen voices, “why ain’t he pilotin’!” “Why?” Mr. Gedge shouted above the din. “_I_ can tell—” His sentence was jerked to an abrupt close. “What in hell’s up?” Two or three women had uttered little shrieks, and, “What was that?” people asked one another. Men turned and looked in each other’s faces. “What _was_ it?” The sudden jar and vibration of the ship lent added force to Mr. Gedge’s charge. “The reason the pilot ain’t pilotin’ is because the captain ordered him off the bridge the second day out.”