"It puzzled me from the first," said the other, "to see how easily you bore with your comrade of the road."
"Why, he is a good soul in his way."
The other gave a grunt of disgust.
"Nay, it is a wonder to me that a lad with your nice notions ever found his way to sea," Phil retorted.
"And I might never have gone, had not Captain Francis Candle been my godfather."
"As for me, I have seen both sides of life; and, but for a certain thing that happened, I might be well enough contented where I am."
"And that?"
Phil hesitated, for though they had talked freely, as young men will, the question searched a side of Phil's life to which as yet he had given no clue. "Why," said he, lowering his voice, "for one thing, I saw for the first time my own grandfather; and for another, I saw a certain old knight who quite won my fancy from such a man as a certain one we know. Come, let us stroll together." And as they walked the deck that night, arm in arm, Phil told his companion what his life had been and what it might have been, and mentioned, in passing, the girl at the inn.
Left to his miseries and his thoughts, of which the first were little better company than the second, the woeful cook turned over and over in his fat head such fragments of their talk as he had succeeded in overhearing, and to say truth, he made little more out of it all than the speakers had intended. But his parched throat teased his wits to greater effort, and being come to such a state that he would have bartered his immortal soul for water, had chance offered, he bethought him of a plan by which, if luck held good, he might escape from his shackles.
The moment for which he waited was a long time coming and he suffered a great variety of increasing miseries before it arrived; but when the watches changed, he saw among the men newly arrived on deck his erstwhile dearest friend, and somewhat reluctantly forgiving his dear friend for belabouring him over the head with a whole salt fish, the cook softly called the man by name.