The little boat, moving gently to the vast and tremorless heaving of the sea, seemed abandoned in that world where nothing moved save the swell, and, far away, a frigate bird drifting south, dwindling and vanishing at last, blotted out in the blue of the morning sky.
The man in the stern of the boat lay as though he were dead, his arm curled over a water breaker and his head on his arm; but now, at the first touch of the sun, he moved, sat up, and, clasping his head with both hands, stared about him.
Heavens! What an awakening that was from sleep, the absolute and profound sleep that follows on disaster! In a moment, as though his mind had been suddenly lit by a great flash of energy that had been accumulating since he closed his eyes, he saw the whole of the events of the last three days in their entirety; he saw the past right back to his childhood, as men see it in that supreme moment that comes to the drowning, and which lights recollection to its farther frontiers.
He saw the schooner Cormorant landing at Ginnis' Wharf in Frisco, and he saw himself on board of it as second mate, Harrod, the first mate, standing by the weather rail, and Coxon, the skipper, just come on board, wiping his face with a red bandanna handkerchief before giving orders to cast off from the wharf where the tall Cape Horners lay moored by the Russian oil tanks, and the grain vessels by the great elevators were filling with living wheat.
He saw the Golden Gate and towering Tamalpais and the great Pacific, violent with the ruffling of the west wind and rolling toward the coast, to burst in eternal song on the beaches of California.
They were bound for Papeetong, away down near the Low Archipelago, with a trade room well stocked and plenty of copra in prospect.
The Cormorant was well found, well manned, and Coxon was an A-1 schooner captain; everything promised a prosperous voyage and a quick return, when on the evening of the second day out Coxon had called his second mate down to the saloon.
"Floyd," said he, "it's not for me to say a word to the second mate against the first, but Harrod, though he's the best chap in the world in some ways, has a weak spot, and that's drink. You notice he never touches anything, but there's no knowing how long he's on that tack—it may last the voyage, it mayn't. Not that he's any way out of the common when he's on liquor, but it's never no good to have a man boozy out of port, so, like a good chap, lead him off it if he seems taken that way. He's my own brother-in-law, and as good as they make 'em, else he wouldn't be aboard the Cormorant. It's my ambition to break him of it, and he's willing to be broke; still, the flesh is weak, as you'll soon discover if you live long in this world and knock against men—and there you are. A word to the wise."
Coxon's own weakness was a violent temper—we all have our weaknesses—and Floyd's was a happy-go-lucky optimism that made him believe in all men. He was only twenty-two, the son of a parson in Devonshire, educated up to fifteen at Blundell's School, set adrift in the world by the death of his father, and choosing the sea, prompted by the master ambition of his life, to be a sailor.
Harrod had run straight for the first week, and then he had fallen. He would appear on deck slightly thick of speech, and sometimes he had a stagger in his walk, and he would repeat his remarks in an uncalled-for way, and tend to turn quarrelsome at the least word.