This world, Priscilla ruled. Joel adored her; Jim Finch gave her the clumsy homage of a puppy—and was at times just as oppressively amiable. Old Aaron talked to her by the hour, while he went about his work. And the other mates—Varde, the sullen; and Hooper, who was old and losing his grip; and Dick Morrell, who was young and finding his—paid her the respect that was her due. Young Morrell—he was not even as old as she was—helped her on her first climb to the mast head. He was only a boy.... The girl, when the first homesick pangs were past, was happy.
Until the day they killed their whale, a seventy-barrel cachalot cow who died as peaceably as a chicken, with only a convulsive flop or two when the lances found the life. Priscilla took a single glimpse of the shuddering, bloody, oily work of cutting in the carcass, and then she fled to her cabin and remained there steadfastly until the long task was done. The smoke from the bubbling try pots, and the persistent smell of boiling blubber sickened her; and the grime that descended over everything appalled her dainty soul. Not until the men had cleaned ship did she go on deck again; and even then she scolded Joel for the affair as though it were a matter for which he was wholly to blame.
“There just isn’t any sense in making so much dirt,” she told him. “I’ve had to wash out every one of my curtains; and I can’t ever get rid of that smell.”
Joel chuckled. “Aye, the smell sticks,” he agreed. “But you’ll be used to it soon, Priss. You’ll come to like it, I’m thinking. Any case, we’ll not be rid of it while the cruise is on.”
She was so angry that she wanted to cry. “Do you actually mean, Joel Shore, that I’ve got to live with that sickening, hot-oil smell for th-three years?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes, Priss. No way out of it. It’s part of the work. Come another month, and you’ll not mind at all.”
She said positively: “I may not say anything, but I shall always hate that smell.”
His eyes twinkled slowly; and she stamped her foot. “If I’d known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have come, Joel. Now don’t you laugh at me. If there was any way to go back, I’d go. I hate it. I hate it all. You ought not to have brought me....”
They were on the broad bench across the stern, in their cabin; and he put his big arm about her shoulders and laughed at her till she could do no less than laugh back at him. But—she assured herself of this—she was angry, just the same. Nevertheless, she laughed....
Joel had put the Nathan Ross on the most direct southward course, touching neither Azores nor Cape Verdes. For it was in his mind, as he had told Asa Worthen, to make direct for the Gilbert Islands and seek some trace of his brother there. That had been his plan before he left port; but the plan had become determination after a word with Aaron Burnham, one day. Joel, resting in the cabin while old Aaron worked there, fell to thinking of his brother, and so asked: