Fitz turned upon the speaker fiercely, looking as if he were going to make some angry remark; but he found no sneer on the face of the skipper’s son, only a frank genial smile, which, being lit up by the warm glow gradually gathering in the west, seemed to glance upon and soften his own features, till he turned sharply away as if feeling ashamed of what he looked upon as weakness, and the incident ended by his saying suddenly—“Let’s go on deck.”
Chapter Seventeen.
“Old Chap”—“Old Fellow.”
Days of slow sailing through calm blue waters, with quite an Archipelago of Eden-like islands showing one or another in sight.
Very slow progress was made on account of the wind, which was light and generally adverse.
Fitz passed his time nearly always on deck with the skipper’s glass in hand, every now and then close enough in to one of the islands to excite an intense longing to land, partly to end his imprisonment, as he called it, partly from sheer desire to plunge into one or another of the glorious valleys which ran upward from the sea, cut deep into the side of some volcanic mountain.
“Lovely!” was always on the boy’s lips. “I never saw anything like this before, Poole. But where’s the port we are sailing for? Are we never going to land?”
“Oh, it’s only a little farther on,” was the reply. “If this wind only gets up a little more towards sundown I expect we shall soon be there.”