Both Adolph and Kep lived forward with the men, and were very snugly bunked indeed. They had come to like each other very much, and Kep felt a little sad when he thought that in the ordinary course of things they might soon be parted. In one thing they swore to each other to be true. Namely, that neither should divulge the secret of the ingot-laden ship unless the other consented. Something grand might come of this secret, but it must, for the present, be theirs and theirs only.
Once more, even in the Wampiri, Kep's flute found him friends. The ship was a clipper of an almost obsolete type, and really belonged to one old man. She was good enough to have had engines put into her, but her owner, who had been at sea himself in his younger days, would not hear of his beautiful white-winged ship being turned into a blessed smoke-jack, and she never would be.
Suffice it to say, she got there all the same, and so Kep and his comrade were at last safely landed at Sidney.
And this beautiful and busy city, with its beautiful and busy great harbour, crowded with the ships of all nations, its streets thronged with well dressed people, its spacious public buildings, and its street cars, what a change all was from life on the lonesome ocean, and the death-life of those inhospitable and barren islands.
How Kep, in his boyish gratitude, thanked God for all He had done for them.
Sidney, but no Breezy.
And yet, somewhere in or about these seas, or on the shore of Eastern Africa, or the coral coast of New Guinea itself, something told Kep that the Breezy was. He had never forgotten the kind smiling face of the young lieutenant, who had taken him down to the wardroom; no, nor the reception that had been accorded him by the crew forward. He still harboured the impression that his fate would be to get appointed to the Breezy in some capacity or another.
But now he remembered that he must seek for employment of some kind. He had some money left, but this he shared with Adolph. He could not see his comrade badly off, and they meant to try hard to get berths in the same ship again.
It would have been easy for Adolph to book as steward's assistant, or even as steward in some homeward bound ship, but no one seemed to need Kep's peculiar talents.
His appointment to the Macbeth appeared to him, now, to have been but a fluke. Heigho! would he ever make such a fluke again.