“I’ll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a month’s wages, she won’t make it around in a hundred an’ fifty days,” he answered. “Yet I’ve come round in the old _Flyin’ Cloud_ in eighty-nine days—eighty-nine days, sir, from Sandy Hook to ’Frisco. Sixty men for’ard that _was_ men, an’ eight boys, an’ drive! drive! drive! Three hundred an’ seventy-four miles for a day’s run under t’gallantsails, an’ in the squalls eighteen knots o’ line not enough to time her. Eighty-nine days—never beat, an’ tied once by the old _Andrew Jackson_ nine years afterwards. Them was the days!” “When did the _Andrew Jackson_ tie her?” I asked, because of the growing suspicion that he was “having” me. “In 1860,” was his prompt reply. “And you sailed in the _Flying Cloud_ nine years before that, and this is 1913—why, that was sixty-two years ago,” I charged. “And I was seven years old,” he chuckled. “My mother was stewardess on the _Flyin’ Cloud_. I was born at sea. I was boy when I was twelve, on the _Herald o’ the Morn_, when she made around in ninety-nine days—half the crew in irons most o’ the time, five men lost from aloft off the Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken square off, knuckle-dusters an’ belayin’-pins flyin’, three men shot by the officers in one day, the second mate killed dead an’ no one to know who done it, an’ drive! drive! drive! ninety-nine days from land to land, a run of seventeen thousand miles, an’ east to west around Cape Stiff!” “But that would make you sixty-nine years old,” I insisted. “Which I am,” he retorted proudly, “an’ a better man at that than the scrubby younglings of these days. A generation of ’em would die under the things I’ve been through. Did you ever hear of the _Sunny South_?—she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an’ changed her name to _Emanuela_?” “And you’ve sailed the Middle Passage!” I cried, recollecting the old phrase. “I was on the _Emanuela_ that day in Mozambique Channel when the _Brisk_ caught us with nine hundred slaves between-decks. Only she wouldn’t a-caught us except for her having steam.” I continued to stroll up and down beside this massive relic of the past, and to listen to his hints and muttered reminiscences of old man-killing and man-driving days. He was too real to be true, and yet, as I studied his shoulder-stoop and the age-drag of his huge feet, I was convinced that his years were as he asserted. He spoke of a Captain Sonurs. “He was a great captain,” he was saying. “An’ in the two years I sailed mate with him there was never a port I didn’t jump the ship goin’ in an’ stay in hiding until I sneaked aboard when she sailed again.” “But why?” “The men, on account of the men swearin’ blood an’ vengeance and warrants against me because of my ways of teachin’ them to be sailors. Why, the times I was caught, and the fines the skipper paid for me—and yet it was my work that made the ship make money.”