Cleggett was anxious to get the Jasper B. into seaworthy condition as
soon as possible. It occurred to him that the employment of expert
advice should be his first step, and early the next morning he hired
Captain Abernethy. That descendant of a seafaring family, though he
felt it incumbent upon him to offer objections that had to be overcome
with a great show of respect, was really overjoyed at the commission.
He left his own cottage a mile or so away and took up his abode in the
forecastle at once. By nine o'clock that morning Cleggett had a force
of workmen renovating both cabin and forecastle, putting the cook's
galley into working order, and cleansing the decks of soil and sand.
That night Cleggett spent on the vessel, with Captain Abernethy.
By Saturday of the same week--Cleggett had bought the vessel on
Wednesday--he was able to take up his abode in the cabin with his books
and arms about him. To his library he had added a treatise on
navigation. And, reflecting that his firearms were worthless,
considered as modern weapons, he also purchased a score of .44 caliber
Colt's revolvers and automatic pistols of the latest pattern, and a
dozen magazine rifles.
He brought on board at the same time, for cook and cabin boy, a
Japanese lad, who said he was a sailor, and who called himself
Yoshahira Kuroki, and a Greek, George Stefanopolous.
The latter was a handsome, rather burly fellow of about thirty, a man
with a kindling eye and a habit of boasting of his ancestors.
Among them, he declared, was Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae. George
admitted he was not a sailor, but professed a willingness to learn, and
looked so capable, as he squared his bulky shoulders and twisted his
fine black mustache, that Cleggett engaged him, taking him immediately
from the dairy lunch room in which he had been employed. George's idea
was to work his way back to Greece, he said, on the Jasper B. If she
did not sail for Greece for some time, George was willing to wait; he
was patient; sometime, no doubt, she would touch the shores of Greece.
The hold of the Jasper B. Cleggett and Captain Abernethy found to be in
a chaotic state. Casks, barrels, empty bottles by the hundred, ruins
of benches, tables, chairs, old nondescript pieces of planking, broken
crates and boxes, were flung together there in moldering confusion. It
was evident that after the scheme of using the Jasper B.'s hulk as one
of the attractions of a pleasure resort had failed, all the debris of
the failure had simply been thrown pell-mell into the hold. Cleggett
and Captain Abernethy decided that the vessel, which was stepped for
two masts, should be rigged as a schooner. The Captain was soon busy
securing estimates on the amount of work that would have to be done,
and the cost of it. The pile of rubbish in the hold, which filled it
to such an extent that Cleggett gave up the attempt to examine it, was
to be removed by the same contractor who put in the sticks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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