“Give us a hand up, boy,” he said a little breathless, but speaking in the calmest and cheeriest of tones. “I’m not so spry as I used to be, but I’ll make it all right—er—ouch, but those barnacles are sharp. I should never have let the boat get such a foul bottom. Now,” as he came up beside Billy, “there we are as fine as you please. We’ll just have to wait a couple of hours, and some one will be sure to pick us up. There’s nothing to worry about in a little spill like this. See, the squall’s gone by and the clouds are clearing away already.”
Billy looked about him and was not so sure. To be perched upon the keel of a capsized boat, rocking precariously with every wave, to have miles of empty ocean on every side is a little disturbing the first time you try it. So at least he concluded as he watched the sun drop slowly toward the horizon.
The war game had drifted away to the north, so that, for the first time in days, there was not a vessel of any kind in sight. Above them the clouds were assuredly blowing away, but over in the west another bank of them, thick and grey and threatening, was rising very slowly to meet the sun. There could also be little doubt that the wind was steadily freshening and the waves splashing higher and higher along the sides of their little boat. All these things Captain Saulsby seemed cheerfully determined to ignore, so Billy decided that it was best for him to say nothing.
“I’ve had a lot of little adventures like this in my day,” the old sailor went on. “It makes me feel quite young again to be in just one more. Why, the first time was when a sampan capsized when we were landing from the Josephine in the harbor of Hongkong. I’ll never forget how I laughed out loud with the queer, warm tickle of the water, when I’d thought for sure it was going to be icy cold. I couldn’t have been much bigger than that.”
He tried to hold up a hand to show Billy the exact height he had been, but so nearly lost his balance in the process that he was obliged to clutch hastily at the slippery support again.
“Did you really go to sea when you were so little?” Billy asked. “I wonder your people let you.”
“They weren’t any too willing,” returned the Captain; “in fact, they weren’t willing at all. My folks were like yours, though you wouldn’t think it; they were people with book-learning, doctors and lawyers and the like. They wanted me to be the same, and when I wouldn’t, but was all for going to sea, they said very well, a sailor I could be, but first I must go to school, for sailors must have learning too. But I couldn’t wait; the wish for the blue water was in my very blood, so I slipped away and shipped for China before they knew it. That was a hard voyage in some ways, but a wonder of a one in others, and when I came home I would listen to nothing they said, but was off and away again before I had been in port much more than a week.”
“And you’ve sailed and sailed and sailed ever since?” Billy asked. A sharp dip of the boat nearly upset him but he managed to speak calmly. He thought it a good plan to keep the old man talking that he might not notice the rising clouds behind him.
“Yes, sometimes on sailing ships and sometimes on steamers, in every trade and bound for every port on earth. I drifted into the Navy at last, and was a bluejacket on just such a battleship as we saw go by today, and it was in that service that I first began to see what a mistake I had made. There were, among the young officers, boys not half my age, but knowing four times more than I ever would. I had to salute when they spoke to me, and I was glad to do it, for it is the like of them and not the like of me that makes the big ships go. I vowed then that I would turn to and learn something, that I would study navigation yet and have a ship of my own some day. But I didn’t stick to it. I drifted here and drifted there, lost or spent my money the day after I got to port, and had to ship again in any berth I could.
“When I was here in New England I was always longing for a sight of palm trees, and the hot sandy beaches, and the brown people and their queer-built houses round the harbours at Singapore or Bangkok or Bombay. But when I was there I was somehow always thinking of how our great, cool, grey rocks looked along this coast with the surf tumbling below and the pine covered hills behind them. I would remember the smell of bayberry and sweetbriar and mayflowers and think it would be the breath of life to me. So it was always, drifting first in one direction and then in another, until I came to port at last with less than I had when I put to sea. When I started out in life I was bound I would be a sea-captain before I was twenty: now that I am nearly four times that it hurts me still to think that the chance is gone forever. It’s a nice end for a man who once thought the sea was all his very own!”