CHAPTER XXV
THEY TURN THE CORNER
THEY had given Tommie the after cabin, but this hot weather the three of them kept the deck at night so that she might have her door open, and to-night, just before dawn when the Wear Jack was right on to Cape St. Lucas, Candon and George were keeping watch and listening to Hank. Hank was lying on the deck with a pillow under his head, snoring. The engine had been shut off to save gasoline, and the Wear Jack, with a Chink at the wheel and the main boom guyed out, was sailing dead before the wind, under a million stars, through a silence broken only by the bow wash and the snores of Hank.
Candon, pacing the deck with George, was in a reflective mood.
“Wonder what that Chink’s thinking about?” said he. “Home mostlike. They say every Chinaman carries China about with him in his box and unpacks it when he lights his opium pipe. Well, it’s a good thing to have a home. Lord! what’s the good of anything else, what’s the good of working for money to spend in Chicago or N’ York? I reckon there’s many a millionaire in the cities, living all day in his office on pills an’ pepsin, would swop his dollars for the old home if he could get it back, the old shanty near where the cows used to graze in the meadows and the fish jump in the stream, with his old dad and his mother sitting by the fire and his sister Sue playin’ on the step.”
“Where was your home?” asked George.
“Never had one,” said Candon, “and never will.”
“Oh, yes, you will.”
“Don’t see it. Don’t see where it’s to come from, even if I had the dollars. I’m a lone man. Reckon there’s bucks in every herd same as me. Look at me, getting on for forty and the nearest thing to a home is a penitentiary. That’s so.”