The captain wiped the happy tears from his remaining eye and turned on Ortho as one recounting an interesting scientific observation.
“Very thin-skinned for a Sambo. D’you know I believe he’d sooner take a four-bag at the gangway than a minute o’ that. I do, so help me; I believe he’d sooner be flogged. Vee-ry curious. Come up and I’ll show you my command.”
The Atlantic was invisible from the tower, sheeted under fog which, beneath a windless sky, stretched away to the horizon in woolly white billows. Ortho had an impression of a mammoth herd of tightly packed sheep.
“There’s a three-knot tide under that, sweeping south, but it don’t ’pear to move it much,” MacBride observed. “I’ll warrant that bank ain’t higher nor a first-rate’s topgallant yard. I passed through the western squadron once in a murk like that there. Off Dungeness, it was. All their royals was sticking out, but my little hooker was trucks down, out o’ sight.” He pointed to the north. “Knitra’s over there, bit of a kasba like this. Er-rhossi has it; a sturdy fellow for a Greek, but my soul what a man to drink! Stayed here for a week and ’pon my conscience he had me baled dry in two days—me! Back there’s the forest, there’s pig . . . what are you staring at?”
Ortho spun about guiltily. “Me? Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing. What were you saying? The forest . . .”
He became suddenly engrossed in the view of the forest of Marmora.
“What’s the matter? You look excited, like as if you’d seen something,” said MacBride suspiciously.
“I’ve seen nothing,” Ortho replied. “What should I see?”
“Blest if I know; only you looked startled.”
“I was thinking.”