“Now, lad,” said he, when it was completed, “you just turn in and take a good sleep and I’ll stand watch.”
As Nat was feeling drowsy again, doubtless owing to the far-reaching influence of Israel Harley’s opiate, he was nothing loath to accept this proposition, and turned in and was speedily in the land of dreams. When the captain awakened him he felt that the last traces of the drug had vanished, and his senses were as clear as a bell. The sun was high and the sea smooth and sparkling. Nat had some coffee and rolls and then joined the captain on deck. He gazed anxiously toward Santa Barbara, eager to catch the first glimpse of the Nomad.
Near by the Lightship several triangular fins were cruising about.
“Sharks!” cried Nat, and recalled with a shudder his terrible experience with these tigers of the sea when he was cast adrift in a sinking boat in mid-Pacific.
“So they be. Thar’s lots of them hereabouts,” said the captain, “but Lor’ bless yer, they’re only little fellows. Very different to the fellers that attacked me when the Sarah Jane Braithwaite was down among the Andaman Islands. Like to hear the yarn?”
“Why, yes,” said Nat, and added with a smile, “I’ve got a yarn of my own about them, too.”
“Waal,” began the skipper, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke as he withdrew his blackened old briar pipe from his mouth, “it was a good many years ago but I had a wooden pin even at that time, for d’ye see my port main brace was taken off when a spar fell on me during a typhoon in the Yaller Sea.
“But, to get to ther particlar day I’m talking of. We was becalmed among the Andamans. A dead flat calm with the pitch boiling in the seams, and there we lay under the broiling sun as ‘idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’, as the poet says. My first mate proposed to me that we should take a swim. Now, although I’m minus one of my spars, I’m a right smart swimmer, and I agreed.
“We had a fine time sporting round thar in the cool water, but suddenly somebody on deck hollers, ‘Sharks!’
“Now that’s a hail you want to act quick on, and you take my alfired-davy on it that we made good time getting back to the ship’s side. But just as we reached it, what d’ye suppose?”