“There are people on board who’ll get the story right,” said Hildegarde.
“Oh, I don’t care! Let ’em say what they like—if only the wind doesn’t bring the floe down on us again.” Cheviot made a move as if to go. “The trouble is,” said Gillies, “I’m short of hands. However hard they keep at it those China boys can’t shift five hundred tons of coal before the tide’s flood.”
“Well, you’ve got a lot of white men on board—”
“Yes,” growled the captain, “and a lot of help I’ll get out of them.”
“What I came up for”—Cheviot drew nearer—“was really to tell you there are men on board this ship who propose to stand by you.”
Gillies, leaning against the locker, neither said nor looked a syllable of thanks. Never even took his bloodshot eyes off the ice line. But the hard face twitched again. A sense of the devouring anxiety he was obviously laboring under made the girl quick to relieve him of any added strain or restraint that he might feel in an unfamiliar presence at such a crisis. Even Louis might be thinking “a woman was in the way.” She stood up, murmuring an excuse for going.
The captain, unheeding, went on in that hoarse, muffled voice: “I’ve just sent an officer below to see if I can get some volunteers.”
“What officer?” said Cheviot. “Not the first?”
“Why not? Yes, the first.” And there was a silence so significant that Hildegarde was glad she had not waited for that to tell her she should leave the men to themselves. But at the threshold she had to stand back an instant to let the cabin-boy pass. As he was in the act of darting in with some food, the wind whisked a paper napkin off the tray. He stooped in the doorway, clutched after the elusive object with skinny, yellow fingers, and as he did so the soup slid off the tray and cascaded over the threshold.