"He didn't know," answered the officer who'd been talking. "But when he described him everybody in Punta Arenas said it was Red Dick. But aren't you an American?"
I said I was and told them my experience, and they all said what a pity my ship wasn't under the American flag so they could put it up to their captain and be sure he would send a party after Red Dick. And they would all like nothing better than to join that party, and an easy matter all 'round, as their ship was to be hanging around the straits for another week.
By this time the others of the party, who'd gone into the brush for wild geese, were coming back. They didn't get any geese, because geese, wild geese, anyway, aren't near so foolish as a lot of people think. They were hungry and sat right down to supper.
Among them, as I looked, was one I knew for Peter Lawson, an old shipmate. A warrant officer I saw he was now, but when I knew him he was a chief carpenter's mate on the old Missalama. We kept eying each other, and by and by he remembered, and we stood up and shook hands across the fire. In half a minute we were talking of old days in the navy.
By this time it was late day, with the sun going down below the hills on the other side of Pouvenir Bay. I remember it went down red as the heart of the fire we were sitting by. Through the little thin whiffs of the smoke of the fire it looked like that—all hot color and no flame. Nothing to that, of course, only pictures like that do start your brain to going. The little bay was there at our feet and the wide straits off to our elbow, and the water of that bay was smooth green where it shoaled on the pebbly spit; but the straits, as far as we could see them, were one long roll of tossing ridges and scooping hollows, and they were all black except where the williwaws, cutting across the tide, would whip the ridges to a marble white.
I saw the sun set red through the thin blue smoke of the fire, and almost in line with the sun and the smoke was the stranded bark with her deckload of lumber. A little farther off was my own little Svend Foyn. It was coming on dark by then and I could see them making ready the anchor light on the Svend Foyn. And it was coming colder, too, for the broad, warm north wind had changed to a thin little icy wind from the south.
And now the fiery-red reflection of the sun was gone from above the hills across the bay, and when that went all warmth went with it. Everybody drew nearer to the fire except the two apprentice boys, who were cleaning up the mess gear in water made hot at a little fire of their own. One of them was singing to himself little jiggly, ragtime songs while he wiped the dishes:
"Oh-h, ahm gwine down to Macon town
Ter buy mah 'Liza Jane a gown—
Ah feel so happy 'n' ah don' know why,
Mah bai-bie, mah hon-ie!"
Every time he stacked up a few plates he would stop to roll a few more cake-walk steps.
"I wish I was feeling as good as you!" I said to myself while I watched him.