"I don't want you to make up your minds to-night," resumed the steward, reducing the humility a degree or so. "I don't care about hotel work. I certainly shouldn't start work at any of these here shanties on Christmas Day. They have approached me, you understand, through Lieutenant Rackham, who has been kind enough to say a good word for my capabilities. But that's not the kind of place I'd like so well as this. Let me camp outside to-night, and cook your Christmas dinner to-morrow, while you think it over."
But Denis said he would prefer to think it over at once, and lit his pipe, and went out to do so then and there, with a troubled face which Jewson could understand and Doherty could not.
"He never liked me," said the steward with a sigh. "And it was my fault," he added self-reproachfully.
"But if you see that you could soon make him like you."
"If he gave me the chance, perhaps."
"He shall!"
Denis was leaning in the moonlight against the windlass staging. There he listened to the lad's strenuous and enthusiastic plea.
"We've never had a mate like that since we've been on Ballarat," urged Jimmy; "and all done in half-an-hour out of our own odds and ends! Why, mister, that steward of yours would make a man of me and a new man of you in less than no time. And he doesn't even ask to be a partner; he's the very man we want, dropped from the stars on to this blessed claim! If we don't snap him up, others soon will, and we deserve to lose the second-best chance we've ever had."
Denis puffed his pipe in silence.
"I know him, you see," he said at last.