CHAPTER VII FATHER AND SON
Willatopy, standing in dignified solitude upon the Captain's bridge, conned the Humming Top through the deep water channels of bewildering intricacy which led from the Dungeness Reef to Thursday Island. Ching, too good a sailor not to recognise a master when he met one, had withdrawn to the chart-room, and left Willatopy to his unchallengeable eminence. The boy, quickly grasping the purpose and use of the steering telegraph, now transmitted his orders direct to the quartermaster beneath his feet in the wheel-house. He was a sailor by right of birth on both sides of the house. His ancestors of Devon had played a faithful, if not a very distinguished part, in the history of the Royal Navy; there has not often been a generation since Harry the Eighth without at least one Toppys in the books of the Navy Office. The Hulas of New Guinea, who to this day build their huts out to sea upon the butt ends of roughly driven piles—like our Neolithic ancestors of the Swiss Lake Dwellings—are a tribe of amphibians. Upon the maritime side of his being there was no collision between white and brown blood in the veins of Willatopy. He was salt all through; saturated with the sea lore which is the subconscious heritage from a naval ancestry; bitten to the bone by sea instincts derived from countless generations of Hula fishers in the Coral waters.
"How in blazes do you remember like that?" asked Ching once as Willatopy drove at full speed with a five-knot tide under him into the hidden maze of coral.
"I don't remember," replied Willie easily, as he delicately manipulated the steering telegraph, and swung the big yacht this way and that, as surely as a racing motorist swings his car. "I don't remember; I know." He never looked at Ching's chart; he never appeared to take any bearings—although those bright, penetrative blue eyes, ranging out over the encircling islands, were all the while noting familiar land features and making their own quick unconscious calculations. He never hesitated for one instant. The Skipper down below, following Willatopy's course upon the chart, would sometimes tremble when he saw by how much the boy ignored the line a careful Admiralty had laid down. But he was too wise to interfere. If you take a pilot you must trust to him, and Willatopy, though he scorned the professional title, was a pilot beyond compare. He did not remember; he knew.
Madame Gilbert was on the boat deck when the yacht drew in towards Port Kennedy. She frowned viciously upon Thursday Island, that sorry western gate of the lovely tropic Straits. A treeless, desolate waste dotted with corrugated iron buildings. Cluster the iron buildings a little, drive wide dusty roads between clumps of them, and one has Port Kennedy, the seat of government. Impelled by greed of pearl and shell, and undeterred by the stark hideousness of the Island, the sweepings of most nations have poured down upon that uncomely spot, and have greatly contributed to make it what it is, and to keep from reaching up towards better things.
"Poor Willatopy," murmured Madame as she gazed upon the polluted scene. "So this is his point of contact with white civilisation. Better Tops Island, a hundred times."
A mile away from the port, Willatopy handed over his charge to her lawful skipper. "Take her in. I go in my yawl." He dropped down the bridge ladder, and ran pattering along the deck. At a sign from Madame he stopped.
"I go in my yawl," cried he, pointing to where that little craft of his bobbed up and down in the yacht's wash at the end of her towing line.
"But, Willatopy," protested Madame, "I am going to your island, and we can't possibly find our way unless you come as our pilot."