The days passed while the men grew weaker and more sluggish at their work, but still the breeze held and the speed of the West Wind did not falter. They passed no ship from which they could obtain water, their only hope lay in the making of port. They turned northward, lost the trade winds, seemed for a terrible moment to be hanging becalmed, but a stiff breeze caught them and bore them still toward home. The old Chinaman seemed to shrivel away like a dead leaf, but he came stumbling every day to share his mouthful of water with his precious tree. Captain Reynolds himself looked more worn and haggard than did any of his men. Only the Chinaman, glancing sideways with his slanting, beady eyes at the lusty green of the little pine, seemed to suspect why. They were like the flitting ghosts of a ship’s crew that morning when the hot, glittering expanse of sea was broken by a wavering line on the horizon and the lookout’s husky call of “Land-ho” announced the low green shore of Maryland. Eighteen days from Gibraltar and all records broken at last!
She came into the Susquehanna River for repairs, did the worn but triumphant West Wind, and Jonathan Adams came rowing out to board her, his sober face for once all wreathed in smiles.
“By five days you shortened the voyage,” he said, “and I had not really hoped for more than four. I always said she was not a tub, but a real ship at last. There will be others like her, and her children’s children will dare to spread such sail that they will cross the Atlantic in half your time.”
As Humphrey came up the ladder to where Miranda was waiting on the wharf, his first words were—
“I left the snuffbox behind,” while she, laughing shakily, answered—
“I knew you would.”
The whole crew, down to the cabin boy, were hailed as heroes when they left the ship, but there was one who managed somehow to go ashore as mysteriously as he had come aboard. The old Chinaman with his treasured pine tree disappeared, no one knew whither, hiding himself, perhaps, lest some emissary from Africa should even yet seek him out and rob him. For more than a month Humphrey searched and inquired for him all up and down the shore of the bay, but no one had seen him and no one knew where he had gone.
Jonathan Adams’ ship the West Wind sailed on many voyages and was the model for other vessels of her class, bigger and swifter even than herself—the great race of American clippers that once ruled the seas. They gave our country the highest place in the world’s shipping, and they brought her, even as Humphrey had said, a thousand miles nearer to her neighbors across the Atlantic. But that is not all of the story of this famous voyage. The real end came seven years later, when Humphrey had risen to be Commodore Reynolds and when, between two cruises, he was spending a holiday at home. One summer afternoon, a small, bent figure toiled up the driveway of the big house above the Susquehanna. Humphrey, with Miranda, was sitting in the shade of the high-columned veranda and for a moment did not recognize the strange face, so covered with dust that the yellow skin and slanting eyes were scarcely visible. But the old Chinaman walked straight to Miranda and laid his offering on her lap.
“For you,” he said. “He wanted to bring it to you from the very first!”
It was not the real pine tree, but the one that you see here, made of jade and enamel with tiny jewels set around the top of the pot. Humphrey and his wife exclaimed and admired and examined it on every side.