‘Go below the port watch!’—his own.
It is blowing a fresh breeze when he comes on deck again at eight bells. It is his wheel. He finds his friend Bill Baker there.
‘East by sowthe,’ says Bill emphatically, giving him a pitying look, and walking for’ard.
‘East by sowthe it is,’ replies Jack, mechanically.
Then, as he somewhat nervously, after the long absence, eyes the white bobbing disc in the binnacle, and squints aloft at the dark piles of canvas, it suddenly bursts upon him. Whilst he has been asleep the wind has shifted into the west. It blows now as if it meant to stay there. They are bound round Cape Horn after all.
‘
Mind your hellum, you booby,’ roars the mate, just [285] ]come on deck. ‘Where are you going to with the ship—back to Adelaide? I’ll keep an eye on you, my lad,’ lurching aft, and glancing first at Jack’s face and then at the compass.
Truth to tell, the latter had been so flustered that he had let the Dido come up two or three points off her course. But he soon got her nose straight again, with, for the first time, a feeling of hot satisfaction at his heart that, upon a day not far distant, he and the man with the red beard, and tip off his nose might, if there was any truth in dreams, be quits. Be sure that, by this Jack’s story was well known for’ard of the foremast. Bill Baker’s tongue had not been idle, and, although a few scoffed, more believed, and waited expectantly.
‘There’s more in dreams than most people thinks for,’ remarked an old sailor in the starboard watch, shaking his head sagely. ‘The first part o’ Jack’s has comed true. If I was Mister Horse I’d go a bit easy, an’ not haze the chap about the way he’s a-doing of.’
But the chief officer seemed to have taken an unaccountable dislike to Ashby from the moment he had first seen him. And this dislike he showed in every conceivable way until he nearly drove the poor chap frantic.