Then the whale birds began to cry and flit about. The whale birds are blind by daylight and their voices scarcely ever heard, they are the owls of the sea.
The girl talked about them for something to say, then she fell to wondering why on a beach like this there were no sea elephants. Raft explained “sea cows” would never come to a washed beach like this, there were no dry rocks for them to “hang about” on.
He had lit his pipe with the tinder box and the smell of the tobacco came good and comforting, the slap and dash of the waves sounded less vicious, too, as though the sea had done its worst to get at them and was foiled.
Then she said, apropos of nothing but the last of her wandering thoughts: “Have you ever seen a man killed?”
He laughed as though over some pleasant reminiscence. “Dozens.” Then he began to recall chaps he had seen killed, falling from aloft and otherwise. He had seen one hit the sea such a smack it split him open, and he had seen a chap under water being pulled to pieces by sharks just as terriers pull an old shoe.
Then he wandered off to a bar scene where a dago—it was at Nagasaki—had been drinking rice rum and knifed a man, a regular prosy old sailor’s yarn, with “I says to him,” and “he says to me” at every turn.
Then he found that she was leaning more heavily against him and was asleep. He put his pipe beside him and slipped an arm round her. Then, as though sleep were infectious, down he sank still holding her and there they lay. He snoring gently and she with her head pillowed on his chest.