He said it just like one of the kids he’d tickled half to death on the wharf. There was a little jerking in his throat, and there came into his face a look so gentle that it made me think of a girl.
“Why don’t you come along on this cruise with me?” I said.
Thomas Jefferson gave a sudden start, and a queer expression came into his eyes, as if he saw something out on the sea that had startled him. Then he laughed. You could hear that laugh of Thomas Jefferson’s three blocks away, and sunshine in winter couldn’t bring more cheer than the sound of it. He looked at me for a moment, and then said:
“Bobby, I’ll go!”
It wasn’t forty-eight hours before Thomas Jefferson had a first mortgage on every soul aboard the “Sleeping Sealer,” from the cap’n to the oiler down in the engine-room. He was able, all right, but you couldn’t have made an able seaman out of him in a hundred years. For all that, he did the work of three men. The first thing you heard when you woke up in the morning was his whistle, and the last thing you heard at night was his laugh or his song. He did everything, from cooking to telling us why Germany couldn’t lick England, and how the United States could clean up the map of the earth if Congress would spend less money on job-making bureaus and a little more on war-ships.
Then we discovered what was in the old alligator-skin valise he carried. It was books. Half the time he didn’t have to read to us, but just talked off the stuff he’d learned by heart. We got to know a lot before the trip was half begun, just by associating with Thomas Jefferson Brown—or Thomas Jefferson, as he was then.
We spent three months up about the Spicer Islands, and then came down toward Southampton Land. Thomas Jefferson was the happiest man aboard until we caught sight of a coast, and then the change began. After that he’d get restless whenever land hove in sight.
Six weeks later we came down into Roes Welcome Sound, planning to get out through Hudson Strait before winter set in. The fact that we were almost homeward bound didn’t seem to affect Thomas Jefferson. I saw the beginning of the end when he said to me one day:
“Bobby, I’ve never seen this northern country. It’s a big, glorious country, and I’d like to go ashore.”
There wasn’t any use arguing with him. The cap’n tried it, we all tried it, and at last Thomas Jefferson prepared to take his leave of us at Point Fullerton, just eight hundred miles north of civilization, where there’s an Eskimo village and a police station of the Royal Northwest Mounted. He came to me the day before we were going to take him ashore, and said: