“Wolfe!”
These were the only words the dorymates uttered for a full minute, as they stood holding each other’s hand, and gazing into each other’s face.
“How do you happen to be here?” asked Breeze at length.
“Oh, my coming is simple enough,” answered Wolfe. “I got a thousand dollars salvage money for helping to carry that brig into port, and thinking I would like to see father and mother once more, I came. I only just got in on the steamer from New York. But where in the name of all that’s wonderful did you come from, and how?”
“I,” said Breeze, “have just got in from Iceland on the steam-yacht Saga.” Then in a few words he gave his friend the briefest possible outline of his adventures since their parting.
“Well!” exclaimed Wolfe, when he had finished, “if it doesn’t beat the ‘Arabian Nights,’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ or anything else I ever heard of, then I’m a mackerel. And to think that I should stand on that steamer’s deck and watch you sail into the harbor only three hours since, and not know it was you any more than Adam! But I must tell father and mother. They’re nearly crazy already from seeing me, and I only hope it won’t upset them entirely when I tell them who you are.”
If it did not quite upset them, it certainly did greatly agitate the stout, ruddy-cheeked Irishman, and his equally stout but pleasant-faced wife, whom Wolfe introduced as his father and mother, to meet the person who had saved their son’s life.
The latter started when she saw Breeze, and after shaking hands with him, and thanking him profusely for all that he had done for her boy, she sat down and gazed at him keenly whenever he was not looking at her.
Her husband, too, appeared to be greatly interested in the lad’s face, and although cordial and hospitable in the extreme, he seemed uneasy in his presence. When he learned that Breeze had come in on the Saga, he remarked to his wife that she was Lord Seabright’s yacht.
“You know him?” asked Breeze, innocently.