The turn of Staniford's thought to Hicks was suggested by the appearance of Captain Jenness, who now issued from the cabin gangway, and came toward them with the shadow of unwonted trouble in his face. The captain, too, was smoking. “Well, gentlemen,” he began, with the obvious indirectness of a man not used to diplomacy, “how do you like your accommodations?” Staniford silently acquiesced in Dunham's reply that they found them excellent. “But you don't mean to say,” Dunham added, “that you're going to give us beefsteak and all the vegetables of the season the whole way over?” “No,” said the captain; “we shall put you on sea-fare soon enough. But you'll like it. You don't want the same things at sea that you do on shore; your appetite chops round into a different quarter altogether, and you want salt beef; but you'll get it good. Your room's pretty snug,” he suggested. “Oh, it's big enough,” said Staniford, to whom he had turned as perhaps more in authority than Dunham. “While we're well we only sleep in it, and if we're seasick it doesn't matter where we are.” The captain knocked the ash from his cigar with the tip of his fat little finger, and looked down. “I was in hopes I could have let you had a room apiece, but I had another passenger jumped on me at the last minute. I suppose you see what's the matter with Mr. Hicks?” He looked up from one to another, and they replied with a glance of perfect intelligence. “I don't generally talk my passengers over with one another, but I thought I'd better speak to you about him. I found him yesterday evening at my agents', with his father. He's just been on a spree, a regular two weeks' tear, and the old gentleman didn't know what to do with him, on shore, any longer. He thought he'd send him to sea a voyage, and see what would come of it, and he plead hard with me to take him. I didn't want to take him, but he worked away at me till I couldn't say no. I argued in my own mind that he couldn't get anything to drink on my ship, and that he'd behave himself well enough as long as he was sober.” The captain added ruefully, “He looks worse this morning than he did last night. He looks bad. I told the old gentleman that if he got into any trouble at Try-East, or any of the ports where we touched, he shouldn't set foot on my ship again. But I guess he'll keep pretty straight. He hasn't got any money, for one thing.” Staniford laughed. “He stops drinking for obvious reasons, if for no others, like Artemus Ward's destitute inebriate. Did you think only of us in deciding whether you should take him?”