“Schooner he finish close up altogether,” Kwaque observed, as the Mary Turner’s rail disappeared.
Swiftly she sank, and no more than a matter of moments was it when the stump of her mainmast was gone. Remained only the whale, floating and floundering, on the surface of the sea.
“It’s nothing to brag about,” Daughtry delivered himself of the Mary Turner’s epitaph. “Nobody’d believe us. A stout little craft like that sunk, deliberately sunk, by an old cow-whale! No, sir. I never believed that old moss-back in Honolulu, when he claimed he was a survivor of the sinkin’ of the Essex, an’ no more will anybody believe me.”
“The pretty schooner, the pretty clever craft,” mourned the Ancient Mariner. “Never were there more dainty and lovable topmasts on a three-masted schooner, and never was there a three-masted schooner that worked like the witch she was to windward.”
Dag Daughtry, who had kept always footloose and never married, surveyed the boat-load of his responsibilities to which he was anchored—Kwaque, the Black Papuan monstrosity whom he had saved from the bellies of his fellows; Ah Moy, the little old sea-cook whose age was problematical only by decades; the Ancient Mariner, the dignified, the beloved, and the respected; gangly Big John, the youthful Scandinavian with the inches of a giant and the mind of a child; Killeny Boy, the wonder of dogs; Scraps, the outrageously silly and fat-rolling puppy; Cocky, the white-feathered mite of life, imperious as a steel-blade and wheedlingly seductive as a charming child; and even the forecastle cat, the lithe and tawny slayer of rats, sheltering between the legs of Ah Moy. And the Marquesas were two hundred miles distant full-hauled on the tradewind which had ceased but which was as sure to live again as the morning sun in the sky.
The steward heaved a sigh, and whimsically shot into his mind the memory-picture in his nursery-book of the old woman who lived in a shoe. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and was dimly aware of the area of the numbness that bordered the centre that was sensationless between his eyebrows, as he said:
“Well, children, rowing won’t fetch us to the Marquesas. We’ll need a stretch of wind for that. But it’s up to us, right now, to put a mile or so between us an’ that peevish old cow. Maybe she’ll revive, and maybe she won’t, but just the same I can’t help feelin’ leary about her.”
CHAPTER XVI
Two days later, as the steamer Mariposa plied her customary route between Tahiti and San Francisco, the passengers ceased playing deck quoits, abandoned their card games in the smoker, their novels and deck chairs, and crowded the rail to stare at the small boat that skimmed to them across the sea before a light following breeze. When Big John, aided by Ah Moy and Kwaque, lowered the sail and unstepped the mast, titters and laughter arose from the passengers. It was contrary to all their preconceptions of mid-ocean rescue of ship-wrecked mariners from the open boat.
It caught their fancy that this boat was the Ark, what of its freightage of bedding, dry goods boxes, beer-cases, a cat, two dogs, a white cockatoo, a Chinaman, a kinky-headed black, a gangly pallid-haired giant, a grizzled Dag Daughtry, and an Ancient Mariner who looked every inch the part. Him a facetious, vacationing architect’s clerk dubbed Noah, and so greeted him.