"Good Lord," I groaned. "It was I, and not your father, who answered the watch."
For several minutes we stared blankly into each other's faces, but it was she who broke the deadly silence.
"We must hurry back," she calmly told him, adding with a nervous catch in her breath: "What a joke on Daddy!"
"A scream of a joke," I muttered, "——one he'll roar over till God-knows-when!"
"We can't go back, Miss Sylvia," the captain now said. "When our mainsheet parted the boom gybed so hard that it opened a seam. It may hold on this tack, and it may not, but we'd sink if the weather hit us on the other side. So I'm making for Key West."
A suspicious quiver played over her lips as the big fellow turned and went upstairs, and I began to hate myself rather cordially.
"Do you happen to have that—that ball of paper?" she asked, when the threatened storm of tears had been controlled.
"No, I threw it down."
A look of terror came into her eyes as she gasped:
"Then he'll find it!"