“Ye don’t look ut,” replied the donkeyman candidly. “Barrin’ the tan, ye’d be blue and lard color about the face this minute. But I feared there was something wrong through not seeing ye on the bridge, so I nipped into the chart-room and pockutted a whisky-bottle that was lying convenient—in case. Pull at the small end, sor.”
The bottle was handed down, and Onslow lifted it, his teeth chattering against the nozzle like castanets; but the spirit drove up color into his face, and set the sluggish blood once more on its appointed journey through his limbs and trunk.
“What has happened since I left you?” he asked.
“Well, first, sor, the captain and meself had a little friendly discussion about what’s been happening, and came to a bit of a financial agreement. But I will say that I figured me new terms very low when I understood it was a thrifle of a conspiracy that ye wanted me to stand in at. And then, sor, we went below to the engine-room and turned steam into the bilge pumps, to heave this nasty slop of water overboard; after which, as chief, I set about making a thrifting repair to the low-pressure engine. Ye see, when that explosion took place, a bit of a casting jumped into the crank-pit, and got jammed there hard before they could stop her. I’ve had a fair do at elbow work, cutting it out cold; but it’s clear now, and she runs as sweetly as she did the day she left the shops. But oh, Mr. Onslow, I wish you could see the Old Man. The sight of that little chap, shoveling coals, and swearing, and tumbling, and burning himself, is enough to make the ghosts of some dead firemen I know about grin and dance sand-jigs in their graves.”
The donkeyman was inclined to be garrulous, and evidently lusted for a considerable chat; but, with returning strength, Onslow’s anxiety grew on him again, and he climbed out on deck keen to be once more in action. His knees were tottery, and the donkeyman gave him an arm aft. But when he had climbed up the ladder and gained the bridge deck, he stood for a minute staring, and then threw up his hands and pitched forward on to the planking, as though a bullet had bitten the life in his brain.
The big donkeyman also was startled. Out of the morning mists of the south there had come up a small center-board schooner of some fifteen tons—an oysterman, perhaps, in the season, and now a sponge-gatherer or a mere coaster. She was coming down over the seas dry as a gull, driving along under her boom foresail and jib.
The donkeyman’s eye hung on her as she surged past the rust-streaked flank of the steamer, some twenty fathoms away, not because the sight of a little white-painted schooner was new to him, not because he was impressed by the danger to the Port Edes’ enterprise in her being seen by any alien eye, but on account of the tiny vessel being handled (in what to her was distinctly ugly weather) by so extraordinary a person as a young and pretty girl. No one else was on deck, and the girl sat on the coaming of the cockpit, tiller in one hand, tiller rope in the other, as unconcernedly as though she had been an ancient mariner, bred and aged in fore-and-afters.
She was a girl, too, with looks much to the Irishman’s liking: with copper-red hair, whose ends blew out from beneath a green Italian’s nightcap; laughing, impudent features, with the color whipped up into warm pinks by the wind; a figure of pretty curves; and the shapeliest little brown fists in the world splayed on the tiller and gripping the restraining tiller-rope. She was fairly well up to the eyes in her steering, but she found time to throw an œillade towards the steamer, which Mr. Sullivan answered with a yell intended to show his complete admiration, and a swirl of his greasy cap. It was then that Onslow fell, and the donkeyman took his eyes from the schooner, and picked him up and once more applied the whisky-bottle. “More drowned than I thought for!” he muttered. “It’ll be a pig’s mess for us if he goes ill.”
But Patrick Onslow had not fainted through the effect of his recent struggle with death. It was quite another matter which had dealt him the sufficing shock.