“Been there?”
The bean-feaster had an audience before you could wink, for he had nodded, chewing harder than ever. Then a pause long enough for him to say modestly, “I’m the man appointed by the Nome miners to go in the commission to Washington and report.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“Did. Coming back now.” With immense respect all within earshot listened to the disquisition on Alaskan mining laws, and the bean-feaster’s modest assurance that through his exertions they were being amended.
Some one aft in the steerage was playing the fiddle, and a couple of darkies were dancing. The older woman is Mrs. L’Estrange’s cook, and Mrs. L’Estrange is the Southern lady of fallen fortunes who is going, with a store of fine damask and all her family silver, to open a high-class boarding-house at Nome! She had read of Mrs. Millicent Egerton Finney, who, in the Klondike, by this means, had made a “pile.”
Mrs. Locke’s admirer, Mr. Meyer, was displaying a small working model of a superfine contrivance, only to discover that every man on the ship had a superfine contrivance of his own which was the grandest thing on earth in the way of gold-saving. Many of the people, as they moved from group to group, greeted Mrs. Locke and Miss Mar; but to Hildegarde’s intent eye all other faces were just merely not the one under the arctic cap.
Her companion watched the whale birds that swarmed so low this morning over the water. Every now and then a fountain spouted up into the sunshine.
But when Hildegarde, distracting herself an instant from her own watch, said, “Do you suppose it’s true those birds feed off barnacles on the whale’s back?”—Mrs. Locke’s little concern for what she stared at was evident in her answering, “There’s one thing I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t seem to have much to say to your friend, the purser.”