“Miss G————, have you nearly done your book?”
“Pretty nearly—why?” I ask, looking up from the pages of “John Herring.”
We are a day or two out from Raratonga, but not even one hundred of the six hundred miles that lie between the Cook Group and lonely Niué is compassed as yet. The winds have been lightest of the light, and from the wrong quarter too, until this morning, when we have “got a slant” at last. Now the Duchess is rolling along in her usual tipsy fashion at seven or eight knots an hour, and the china-blue sea is ruffled and frilled with snow. It is hot, but not oppressively so, and I have been enjoying myself most of the morning lounging on a pile of locker cushions against the deck-house, alternately reading, and humming to myself something from Kipling about:
Sailing south on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
Sliding south on the long trail, the trail that is always new.
The pirate captain has been at the wheel for the last two hours, but I have not taken much note of the fact. Our only mate left us in the Cook Group, for a reason not absolutely new in the history of the world (a pretty little reason she was, too); and our bo’sun, who has been giddily promoted to a rank that he describes as “chief officer,” is not exactly a host in himself, though he is a white man. In consequence, the pirate and he have been keeping watch and watch since we sailed—four hours on and four hours off—and, as one or two of our best A.B.s declined to go down to Niué, and most of the others are bad helmsmen, the two whites have been at the wheel during the greater part of their watches.
I have grown quite accustomed to seeing one or other standing aft of the little companion that leads down to the cabin, lightly shifting the spokes in his hands hour after hour. It never occurred to me, however, that I was personally interested in the matter.
But we are in the South Pacific, and I have still a good many things to find out about the “way they do things at sea,” here where the ocean is the ocean, and no playground for globe-trotting tourists.
“Are you nearly done?” asks the pirate again, shifting half a point, and throwing a glance at the clouds on the windward side. They are harmless little clouds, and only suggest a steady breeze.
“I have about half an hour’s reading left,” I answer.