“She was out from Avalon in a motor boat, and she’d run short of spirit and sailed up to us, thinkin’ we were at anchor. Providence! I should think so! Providence and the kelp beds, for only for them we’d have been twenty miles to the s’uth’ard, driftin’ to Hades like hutched badgers on a mill stream. We told her how Ginnell had fixed us, and she told us how the gasoline had fixed her. ‘And now,’ says she, ‘will you give me a biskit, for I’m hungry and I wants to get back to Avalon, where my poppa is waitin’ for me, and he’ll be gettin’ narvous,’ she says.
“‘Lord love you,’ says I, ‘and how do you propose to get back?’
“For the wind had fallen a dead ca’m, and right to Catalina and over to San Clemente the sea lay like plate glass, with the Kuro Shiwo flowin’ under like a blue satin snake.
“She bit on her lip, but she was all sand, that girl—Culpepper were her name—and not a word did she say for a minit. Then she says, aimin’ to be cheerful: ‘Well, I suppose,’ says she, ‘we’ll just have to stay at anchor here till they fetch me or the wind comes.’
“‘Anchor!’ said I. ‘Why, Lord bless you, there’s a mile-deep water under us! We’re driftin’.’
“‘Driftin’!’ she cries. ‘And where are we driftin’ to?’
“That fetched me, and I was hangin’ in irons when Blood chipped in and cheered her up with lies and told me to stay with her whiles he went down below and got some breakfast ready, and then I was left alone with her, trustin’ in Providence she wouldn’t ask no more questions as to where we were driftin’ to.
“She sat on the cargo hatch whiles I filled a pipe, lookin’ round about her like a cat in a new house, and then she got mighty chummy. I don’t know how she worked it, but in ten minits she’d got all about myself out of me and all about Ginnell and Blood and the Yan-Shan and the dollars we’d missed; she’d learned that I never was married and who was me father and why I went to sea at first start. Right down to the colour of me first pair of pants she had it all out of me. She was a sure-enough lady, but I reckon she missed her vocation in not bein’ a bilge pump. Then she heaves a sigh at the sound of ham frying down below, and hoped that breakfast was near ready, and right on her words Blood hailed us from below.