The keeper and Joe Sayre picked him up and carried him, as men on shipboard carry a lighter sail, to the station. Mrs. Biggles, entirely reassured, they left in her cabin. At the station a bed was made on the floor in the living room, not far from the stove. The keeper got out his medicine chest and prepared to spend a wakeful night.
The man was evidently in a very bad state. Sedatives seemed to have no effect on him. He tossed about on the floor as if he felt a heaving deck under him. He talked almost continuously. His exchanges with the boarding-house keeper and with the skipper of the Mermaid were on his lips; and interspersed with cringing entreaties were sentences that must have been uttered in a quarrel with the man he had killed. Cap’n Smiley listened patiently, but he could not make much of it.
The man killed in the fight had not been a sailor but a landsman, that was evident, and he had had something to do with a woman—no, a girl. Then came the words, “Six years old,” and the keeper suddenly realized that all this might relate to the child sleeping in his bed. He bent down and waited for her name, but it never came. Most likely the speaker did not know it. There was something about a “Captain King,” but the name of the Mermaid’s captain had been Jackson.... This Captain King had had something to do with the six-year-old girl.... She was not his child but another’s.... He had arranged to send her back ... keeping himself out of it.... Child ... Cap’n Smiley’s thoughts travelled to the letter found with the body of the Mermaid’s skipper. It must have been from this Captain King. But to whom was he returning this child who was not his? And who were her parents? All this sick man knew he had learned from an agent of Captain King who had brought the child to the master of the Mermaid, and who had been drinking with the money someone, presumably King, had paid him.... The keeper, with a beating heart, gave heed to the sailor’s talking. Much of it was irrelevant and not a little was unclean; once the man sang part of a chantey, and once he cursed a fellow working beside him aloft on a yard. It was a long and strained vigil that the Coast Guardsman kept, and when, toward morning, the poor wretch on the floor sank into a coma and died, he had an intolerable sense of being cheated, first by a dead man who should have kept his papers in oilskin packets, and then by a dying man whose tongue should either have wagged a few hours longer or never have wagged at all.
V
Spring advanced. The velvety grass of the salt meadows became a delightful green. Mermaid of the Lone Cove Station played all day among the dunes and down by the surf, and the men, particularly Ho Ha, played with her. She had a part in their daily drills and exercises. When they wigwagged with red and white flags she wigwagged with a small red and white flag, too. When the little brass cannon was fired and Jim Mapes, standing on a platform that encircled a high pole—a platform that represented the maintop as the pole represented a ship’s mainmast—caught the heaving line and made it fast Mermaid, her hair glinting in the sunlight, stood beside him. The line rigged, Mermaid made the round trip to the dunes and back, and then a last trip to the dunes in the breeches buoy. Her two small legs protruded ridiculously, and the tip of her head was hidden in the big circle of the buoy’s belt. On other days there was drill with the surf boat, but on these occasions Mermaid could only stand on the beach and jump up and down with excitement while her uncles (as she was taught to call them) waded warily out in big hip boots, watched for the right moment, and pushed beyond the breakers. Cap’n Smiley, who was always helping the little girl to invent games, had suggested to her that she play she was on a desert island. He had explained to her what a desert island was, and had made her acquainted, verbally, with one Robinson Crusoe.
She, Mermaid, was a desert islander and the surfboat, returning, was a boat come to take her off. She had been alone, utterly alone, on the desert island for years. At the sight of the boat coming through the surf emotion should be hers. It was, and would have been anyway; but it might never have been the imaginative and kindled thing it became with the keeper’s help. Standing at the tiller he would call out, as the boat turned shoreward:
“Courage! You shall be restored to your family and friends!”
And when the boat was beached he would advance to the child, bow respectfully before her, and even sometimes, kneeling, kiss her hand. He would say:
“Your gracious Majesty, we have voyaged to the Indies and have taken possession of them in the name of Castile!”
Or: