He paused, and smiled approvingly. "A mess of any kind worries us, and we don't take long to straighten it out. Same feelings in the Germans and Scandinavians. I'll say that for them, any way. Your friends swept up the steerage?"
"They took the Slavs and Jews, and pitched them down the second hatch on to the orlop deck. Things will go smoothly now our crowd are on top."
"Your crowd?" said Agatha.
The Canadian nodded. "That's what he meant," he said. "There are two kinds of folks you and the rest of them are dumping into Canada. One's the kind that will get up and hustle, break land, and build new homes—log at first, frame and stone afterwards. They go on from a quarter-section and a team of oxen to the biggest farm they can handle, and every fresh furrow they cut enriches all of us. The other kind want to sit down in the dirt and take life easily, as they've always done. The dirt worries everybody else, and we've no use for them. By and bye our Legislature will have to wake up and stop them getting in."
He went on with his dinner after this, but his observations left Agatha thoughtful. She was, for one thing, beginning to understand one side of her companion's character. He, it seemed, stood for practical efficiency. There was a driving force in him that made for progress and order. It was apparently his mission to straighten things out. Some folks of his kind, she reflected, now and then made a good deal of avoidable trouble; but there was in this man, at least, a half-whimsical toleration, which rendered that an unlikely thing in his particular case. Besides, she had already recognised that she was in some respects fortunate in having such a man for her companion.
Her deck chair was always set out in the most sheltered and comfortable place. If there was anything to be seen, a cargo boat plunging along forecastle under, or a great iron sailing ship thrashing out to the westwards, with the spray clouds flying about her hove up weather side, he almost invariably appeared with a pair of powerful glasses. She was watched over, her wishes anticipated, and the man was seldom obtrusively present when she felt disposed to talk to somebody else. It struck her that she had thought a good deal about him during the last few days, and rather less than usual about Gregory, which was partly why she did not walk up and down the deck with him, as usual, after dinner that evening.
Three or four days later the Scarrowmania ran into the Bank fog, and burrowed through it with whistle hooting dolefully at regular intervals. Now and then an answering ringing of bells came out of the clammy vapour, and the half-seen shape of an anchored schooner loomed up, rolling wildly on grey slopes of sea. Once, too, a tiny dory, half filled with lines and buoys, slid by plunging on the wash flung off by the Scarrowmania's bows, and Agatha understood that the men in her had escaped death by a hairsbreadth. They were cod fishers, Wyllard told her, and he added that there was a host of them at work somewhere in the sliding haze. She, however, fancied, now and then, that the fog had a depressing effect on him, and that when the dory lay beneath the rail there had been a somewhat unusual look in his face.
Then a breeze came out of the north-west, with the sting of the ice in it, but the fog did not lift, and the Scarrowmania plunged on through it with spray-wet decks and the grey seas smashing about her bows. It was bitterly cold and clammy, the raw wind pierced to the bone, but the voyage was, at least, rapidly shortening, and one evening Agatha paced the deck with Wyllard in a somewhat curious mood. Perhaps it was merely the gloom re-acting upon her, for she was looking forward to the landing with a certain half-conscious shrinking.
They stopped by the rails presently, looking out upon the tumbling seas that rolled out of the sliding haze tipped with livid froth, and the dreariness of the surroundings intensified the girl's depression. There was something unpleasantly suggestive in the sight of the fog that hid everything, for she had of late been troubled with a half-apprehensive longing to see what lay before her. In the meanwhile, she noticed the look-out standing, a lonely, shapeless figure, amidst the spray that whirled about the plunging bows. By and bye she saw him turn and wave an arm apparently towards the bridge behind her, and she heard a hoarse, wind-out cry. What it meant she could not tell, but in another moment the Scarrowmania's whistle shrieked again.
Then a grey shape burst out of the vapour, and grew with astonishing swiftness into dim tiers of slanted sailcloth swaying above a strip of hull that moved amidst a broad white smear of foam. It was a brig under fore-course and topsails, and as Agatha watched her she sank to her tilted bowsprit, and a big grey and white sea foamed about her bows.