And when to us the Lord says, ‘Come!’
We’ll bow our heads, ‘His will be done,’
And all together we shall go beneath the ocean’s roar–––”
any stranger hearing and seeing might have understood why it was that their crews were ready to follow these men to death.
“The like of you, Tom O’Donnell, never sailed the sea,” said Patsie Oddie when they had got the last ro-o-ar––“even the young ladies come in off the street to hear you better.”
He meant Minnie Arkell, who was standing in the doorway with her eyes fixed on O’Donnell, who had got up to go home, but with Wesley trying to hold him back. He was to the door when Minnie Arkell stopped him. She said she had heard him singing over to her house and couldn’t keep away, and then, with a smile and a look into 228 his eyes, she asked O’Donnell what was his hurry––and didn’t he remember her?
In her suit of yachting blue, with glowing face and tumbled hair, she was a picture. “Look at her,” nudged Clancy––“isn’t she a corker? But she’s wasting time on Tom O’Donnell.”
“What’s your hurry, Tom?” called Wesley. “Another song.”
“No, no, it’s the little woman on the hill. She knew I was to come down to-night and not a wink of sleep will she get till I’m home. And she knows there’ll be bad work to-morrow maybe and she’d like to see me a little before I go, and I’d like to see her, too.”
“She’s a lucky woman, Captain O’Donnell, and you must think a lot of her?” Minnie Arkell had caught his eye once more.