For the next two days, Donald saw Ruth each evening. Of course Moodey was there, but it seemed as if the girl favored McKenzie more than the Halifax youth. Dressed in clothes which enabled him to feel at home in her company, the young fisherman felt that only Moodey’s presence prevented him from cultivating the intimacy he yearned for. The Monday morning came all too quick for Donald, though Moodey felt no regret. McKenzie was bound “to the south’ard” and would not see her again for possibly two or three months. Moodey, in Halifax, could visit her whenever she permitted. McKenzie squirmed when he thought about it, and pictured his rival wooing Ruth with a free rein and no opposition. He would have to do something to keep his memory green, mused Donald, and when she was about to drive away in the team to catch the Halifax train at the station ten miles away, he managed to secure a few minutes’ talk with her à la solitaire and screwed his courage up to ask if he might write to her in Halifax.
With a sweet smile, she said, “Most certainly, Don. I shall be delighted if you will. Write and let me know all about Havana and the places you visit. We’re pals, aren’t we? Write me a nice chummy letter, and if you come to Halifax during the winter telephone me first thing, so’s we can have an evening together.” And with her merry blue eyes and pretty face photographed on his mind and her farewell greetings ringing in his ears, he turned from thoughts of love and wooing to more mundane and sterner things.
On a cold November morning, the Queen’s County, with a hold packed with drums and casks of dried cod-fish and a deck-load of spruce lumber filling the space between fo’c’sle head and poop-break, towed out of Eastville Harbor and to sea. A couple of miles offshore, the tug cast them off and the brig swung south for warmer climes, with her crew crowding the canvas on her. It was a very happy Donald that paced her weather alley that night, smoking and musing. As Mister McKenzie, second mate of a beautiful little clipper brig, he was standing his watch in charge of the ship, and he kept an eye on the weather-leach of the straining t’gallan’s’ls, and thought of his mother, his home on the hill, and Ruth.
“Eighteen years of age and keeping a home of my own, and with the dear old Mater comfortably settled in it, and me, second mate of this fine little packet! Donald Percival McKenzie—you’re a very lucky boy! And, maybe, if you watch yourself, and play your cards right, you’ll win the dearest and loveliest.... Um-um!” He smiled happily to himself and sensing a flap aloft of the t’gallan’s’l leach, he turned to shout to the wheelsman, “No higher, Jack! You’re shaking her!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Donald Mckenzie celebrated two noteworthy events in Havana, Cuba. One was his twenty-first birthday, and the other was the successful completion of his first voyage as master of a vessel. She wasn’t a very big vessel—being but a fishing schooner of 99 tons—but still she was a vessel and required as much skill in sailing and navigating as a craft ten times her size. Judson Nickerson, in the brig Queen’s County, had arrived in Matanzas a couple of days before McKenzie attained his majority, and he journeyed the forty miles or so to Havana to help his friend celebrate the occasion.
McKenzie, a man grown, tall, lithe and sinewy, sea-tanned and good looking, and dressed in white ducks and a Panama hat, met his former skipper in the rotunda of the Hotel Sevilla. “Waal, by Jupiter!” cried Nickerson, wringing his hand. “You got daown here anyways, an’ you ain’t pushed any of th’ Bahamas off th’ charts in gittin’ here, have you? And you’re twenty-one, eh? Lord Harry, Donny-boy, you make me feel old—”
“Yes, you look old, you ancient crock!” laughed the other, staring at his friend critically. Judson had lost some of his ranginess, his angularities had filled out, and his sharp face had smoothed and rounded, until he looked younger than ever he did in Kelvinhaugh days. “Why you’re only a mere fifteen-year jump ahead of me, and since you’ve been living a quiet, settled life for the past four years, the lines of dissipation have faded—”