“That’s a long way from Los Angeles.”
“Maybe, but it’s nearer than the Bay o’ Whales.”
The freighter grew; she was making anything from twelve to fifteen knots; she would pass the Wear Jack and a signal would stop her as sure as a bullet through the eye will stop a man.
Then, suddenly, something that had risen to Hank’s surface intelligence like a bubble, burst angrily.
“You can go down and tell her yourself,” said he, “it’s no affair of mine. If she wasn’t fooling there with Bud, she’d have seen the ship. How’n the nation do you think I’m going to go down and give you away like that?”
Candon hung silent, as if offended with the other. He wasn’t in the least. His eyes were fixed on the water over the side. Right below, in the bit of shadow cast by the ship against the morning sun, the water lay, pure emerald, and showing fathom-deep glimpses of life, scraps of fuci, hints of jelly fish and once, far down, like a moving jewel in a world of crystal, an albacore passing swift as a sword thrust.
Ahead of them on the lifting swell a turtle was sunning itself awash in the blue of that lazy silent sea, one polished plate of its carapace showing like a spot of burnished steel.
Candon found himself wondering why one plate should shine like that. It looked now like a little window in a roof, then it seemed to him that out of that window came an idea, or rather a vision. A horrible vision of the freighter going off with Tommie and vanishing beyond the northern sky-line with her. Not till that moment had he recognised that T. C. was at once the lynch-pin of their coach and the thing that had suddenly come to lend reason to his own life. His whole existence had led logically up to the Vanderdecken business and the Vanderdecken business had led to her capture and her capture had given him something to care for, not as a man cares for a girl, but more as a lonely man cares for a child or a dog. It was her small size, maybe, that clinched the thing with him and made him feel that he’d sooner do a dive overside than lose touch with her.
Hank was feeling at that moment pretty much the same. The microscopic Tommie had captured the leathery Hank as a chum.
The freighter drew on and they could see now the touch of white where the spume rose in a feather at her fore foot. It was a huge brute of a Coleman liner up from Callao or Valparaiso, a five thousand tonner with a rust-red funnel.