“Kearney,” said Lestrange, as he turned to the boat, and speaking without any sadness in his tone, “I may be wrong, but it has just come to me that I will never see that ship any more.”
The sailor, taking advantage of the fact that the dinghy had slipped her moorings in the last few minutes and had to be captured where she had grounded against a spur further along, made no reply.
Bowers, instructed by Stanistreet, had given him the hint that Lestrange’s compasses wanted correcting, and that he wasn’t to be “crossed” if he put up strange ideas about things, more especially if those ideas had anything to do with his lost children.
“Which children are you meanin’?” had asked Kearney.
“Them two in the boat we found,” replied Bowers.
“Children! What are you talkin’ about?” had asked the other.
“Maybe you’ll get it into your thick head he’s always seein’ them same as when they were little,” replied Bowers, “and he’s got it fixed in his nut he’s to find them again, that they’re somewhere hid on the island, not them but their sperrits; that’s how the land lays with him, and now you know.”
Kearney had thought a good deal on this matter. He had a fair charge of superstition in his make-up and no wish to increase his education in psychic affairs, reckoning bad luck, ghosts, omens, and all such things on the same string and to be avoided.
CHAPTER IX
THE ROLLERS