CHAPTER VII
THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON
When Lestrange and Stanistreet had been rowed ashore, Bowers set the lads to work clearing up and putting things straight.
The Ranatonga was a schooner of the old Pacific type built at Velego and for the sandalwood trade by men who recognised that speed and cargo space are almost synonymous terms. Her lines were lovely, and her character; never would she play a man false and, to use Bowers’ words, a child might have steered her. He had fallen in love with her and the fo’c’sle hands cursed his passion, which kept them Flemish-coiling, polishing and deck-scrubbing—all but Jim, bo’sun’s mate and second in importance after Bowers.
Kearney was his other name, but it was never used. He had no letters; like Bowers, he could not write his name, but he was great with his fists in an emergency, and he could do anything with his hands.
Jim had been in the gold rush—there were dead men lying in One Horse Gulch and on Dows Flat that had known him, and the scars on his hide were many—but he had made no profit out of the business. Then the sea took him, and drink, and the sandalwood traders used him, so that he was never out of employment one way or another—always in schooner work and escaping by some miracle the whalemen’s crimps at a time when shanghaied men were bringing thirty dollars a head.
When Bowers had bathed and dried off Dick, the child had run to this scamp, clasped him round the legs and looked up into his hard-bitten face laughing and with evident approval.
It was a new moment in the life of Jim and the start of what almost amounted to a quarrel between him and Bowers, for Jim had danced the child in his arms, to say nothing of the fact that the child had shown a predilection for Jim.
Jealousy! No man would ever have suspected such a thing in connection with a leathery old salt like Bowers, yet there it was, the jealousy of a nursery-maid, patent and plain and exhibiting itself now in words.
Work had knocked off, darkness was stealing over the lagoon and the lads were lying on deck, down below, the child was asleep in its bunk, and with his back against the rail, filling a pipe, Bowers was telling off Jim.