How those yards seesawed up and down with the rolling of the ship, and the mastheads, they dipped too, quite as if they might pitch down upon a body! Miles Rigdale, standing with legs craftily planted and head thrown well back, stared and stared at their measured movement till, dizzy with the feeling that the great spars were tottering loose, he was glad to straighten his aching neck once more.
"Did you see a goose, all roasted, flying for your mouth?" Francis Billington called from the waist of the ship, where he perched jauntily upon the bulwark.
Sauntering from his place near the companion way, Miles halted beside the speaker; not that he had a great liking for Francis Billington, but he was a sociable lad, who must talk to some one, and, as the bleak air had driven the women and children into the great cabin, while the men were absent,—the leaders conferring in the roundhouse and the lesser men seeking firewood on shore,—he could for the moment find no comrade save young Billington.
The latter was an unprepossessing lad, stunted and small for his fourteen years, with elfish eyes which he now turned sharply on Miles. "I take it, Jack Cooke is ill, and Giles Hopkins has packed you about your business, that you've come to spend the time with me," he suggested disagreeably.
"I take it, maybe you've spoke the truth," Miles answered unruffled, as he propped his chin on his fists and braced his elbows against the bulwark.
Gazing thus northward, he could see all about him green hills, wooded to the water's edge, now higher, now lower, as the ship mounted upon the waves, and the strip of sand beach, off which rode the bobbing longboat. "I wish my father had taken me with him when they went to fetch the wood," Miles broke out at that sight; "it's weeks and weeks since I set foot on land."
"Pooh! I've been ashore thrice already," bragged Francis, setting one arm akimbo, though he took good care to grip the shrouds tightly with the other hand, for the bulwark was not the safest of perches.
Miles tried to swallow down his envy, but he could not help saying, with a touch of triumph: "Anyhow, you saw no savages, and my father saw 'em when he went exploring with Captain Standish,—six Indians and a dog, he saw."
"So did my father," Francis sought to crush him; but Miles, declaring sudden truce, was asking, with civil interest: "You did not see any lions when you went ashore, did you, Francis?"