In spite of it his men liked him. He was a straightforward sailor. He knew his lights from Port Colborne to Two Harbors. He did not drive his men, and his company trusted him. Long ago, if he had cared for it, he might have been given one of the passenger runs. And now he was about to do the thing he had dreaded for many years, the thing that was the ambition of all the other company skippers. He was to take charge of their crack passenger boat for the trip from Superior and Duluth down to Buffalo. Once more he was to go through the river where his wife was lost. Once more he was to pass within a heavin’ line’s length of the spot where his grandson followed the plunging _Masterson_ to the bottom when she turned turtle. * * * * * Captain Trinder certainly did not look queer as he came aboard that day in Superior while we were taking on the last few bags of flour. He was a typical Great Lakes skipper, tall and straight in spite of his sixty years. He looked like an old dog who had held the bones of all Great Lakes waters in his teeth many times, and who knew what the St. Mary’s was like in a blizzard. We had arrived in Duluth the day before on our usual schedule, had dumped ashore the passengers, some of whom were on their way to the Yellowstone Park. Others were on a round trip on the “greatest inland water voyage of the world,” as it was put in the advertisements sent to the big eastern magazines. As soon as we got rid of the passengers we crossed to Superior to take on our cargo for the trip down. Three hours before sailing, the skipper had been carried back across into a hospital in Duluth. We had to have a new master. Fortunately Trinder’s carrier was in port. No one else was within a day’s steam of us, and so Trinder brought himself aboard. By the time the last passenger had come on and the black gang had hoisted their allotment of ice up the after decks and into the galley ice boxes for iced water and tea and other stuff the fancy passengers might need, the wind had chased the last of the high, white cumulus clouds away and had brought up black ones in their place. The wind came off the lake at such an angle that the narrow entrance to the harbor was a most difficult opening to hit, and the waves broke on the long spit that connects Duluth and Superior with vicious snaps that seemed to punctuate the more sustained and higher notes of the wind. The sun went down in a black and angry west, the whistle blew its departure blast, the none-too-good orchestra struck up a brave air, and we backed out into the harbor waters.