"Yes; seal pelts if they're secured in an honest manner. I don't care where Marr disposes of his catch, as long as the catch is square and aboveboard!"
"Here comes the walrus again. Look how he's smiling. They must have had a nip of gin. Marr is rubbing his hands like as if he'd made a good bargain."
The Japanese waddled to the rail, climbed upward, and descended the ladder to the waiting small boat. Marr stood over him and cast off the painter, and the boat sprang away from the sheer of the Pole Star. It danced across the sea, vanished under the Penyan Maru's counter, and was hoisted aboard.
A plume of black Japanese coal smoke shot up from the rusty funnel. The yards were squared and the sealer wallowed toward the north and west, vanishing in a cloud of its own making.
A bell later Marr gave the order for a change of course and reached for the engine-room telegraph. The screw thrashed; the crew sprang to weather and lee braces. The Pole Star started back over the old pathway on the trackless ocean. Her compass point had been given as east.
It was a hushed company that gathered about the table that night in the steerage of the Pole Star. The change of course, the gamming by the Japanese sealer, the mystery of the skipper's actions—all these drove silence into the mates' hearts.
Stirling and Cushner soon departed and left the first and second engineer to their thoughts.
The two seamen, who had found a tie in common, strode to the forepeak of the whaler, lighted their pipes from the same match, and stared out over the dark velvet of the North Pacific.
Cushner dragged on his stem for a long five minutes. He was awakened to speech by the striking of the ship's bell forward when the lookout lifted a marlinespike from the belfry and chimed two short strokes, repeated by two more.
"Four bells!" declared the Yankee. "She's four bells, Stirling. Four bells, an' we're going back. Wouldn't wonder if we make California for our first landfall."