"You are too young and inexperienced," I asserted in mock gravity. "Otherwise you could hardly have lived a week in the Andromeda without realizing that the stage is set, with the call-boy making his last hasty round, beating upon the doors of the dressing-rooms and summoning the people of the play to come and take their places."
"I can't understand a word you say!" she protested petulantly. "Do you mean Conetta and Jerry Dupuyster?"
"Miss Kincaide and Jerry are only two, and the cast of characters is large. Wait patiently, Edie, and you shall see. Meanwhile, if I am not mistaken, that long, low streak in the west—you can just make it out if you shade your eyes from the sun glare on the water—is land."
She was up and gone at the word, flying to the bridge and crying her discovery—or mine. What the land was, I could not tell. Van Dyck had made a joking mystery of the yacht's course, which, naturally, none of us could determine with any degree of accuracy merely by looking now and then at the telltale compass in the cabin ceiling. I fancied that Van Dyck's object in keeping us in the dark was chiefly to add something to the zest of the cruise, the interest lying in the uncertainty as to what landfall we should first make. As to this, however, nobody seemed to care greatly where we were going, or when we should arrive, so, as one may say, the small mystery had hitherto fallen flat.
But now there was a stir among the after-deck idlers, and Major Terwilliger, thrifty grasper at opportunity, immediately made a pool upon the name of the landfall—with Jack Grey whispering to me that the major had already fortified himself by casually questioning the hard-faced sailing-master as to the yacht's latest quadrant-reading—from which he had doubtless been able privately to prick off the latitude and approximate position of the Andromeda upon the cabin chart.
V
ANY PORT IN A STORM
As an easy matter of course, Major Terwilliger won the pool. The land sighted proved to be Cape Gracias á Dios, the easternmost point of Nicaragua. It would say itself that the Mosquito Coast, low, swampy, and with only three practicable harbors along its three-hundred-mile sweep, could have no attractions for a party of winter pleasurers, and we were leaving Cape Gracias astern when the Andromeda's course was suddenly changed and she was headed for land.
Climbing to the bridge a little later, where I found Van Dyck setting the course for the Madeira-man who had the wheel, I learned the reason for the unannounced change.