Having no boat, they could only watch the cask as it came slowly nearer and nearer, and several of the men prepared to jump overboard and swim for it in case it should drift past them. At last, when it was about thirty feet away, the skipper, making a skilful cast, settled the bight of a light line over the strange craft. Then he carefully drew it towards the schooner, over the low rail of which a couple of the crew were hanging, waiting with out-stretched arms to grasp it.
A minute later the cask stood on the schooner’s deck, and Captain McCloud was lifting tenderly from it a sturdy, well-grown baby boy, apparently about two years old. The little fellow smiled in the weather-beaten face, and stretched out his arms eagerly as the rough fisherman bent down towards him. At the same instant there came a fluttering of sails overhead, with a rattling of blocks, and one of the crew sang out as he sprang to the wheel, “Here’s a breeze! and it’s fair for home!”
“The baby’s brought it!” shouted another. “Hurrah for the baby!”
The shout was eagerly taken up by the crew; three hearty cheers were given for the baby, and three more for the breeze he had brought with him. Then, springing to sheets and halyards with more enthusiasm than they had shown before on the whole cruise, the active fellows quickly had the Sea Robin under a cloud of light canvas, and humming merrily along towards Gloucester.
They now found time to look at their baby, who, held in the skipper’s arms while he gave the necessary orders for working the schooner, contentedly sucked his thumb and gazed calmly about with the air of being perfectly at home. He was a beautiful child, with great blue eyes and yellow hair that curled in tiny ringlets all over his head. He was plainly dressed; but all that he wore was made of the finest material. Altogether he was so dainty a little specimen of humanity that he seemed like a pink and white rose-bud amid the rough men who surrounded him. He gazed at them for a minute or two with a smile, as though he would say that he was most happy to make their acquaintance, and was not in the least embarrassed by their stares. Then he turned to the skipper, and began to cry in exactly the tone with which he had announced his presence in the floating cask.
“Hello!” exclaimed the skipper, who, though married, had no children of his own, and had never held a baby before in his life, “what’s up now? Here, ‘doctor,’ you’ve had some experience in this line, I believe; cast your weather eye over this way and tell us the meaning of the squall.”
The cook, or “doctor,” as he is almost always called on board the fishing schooners, and, in fact, on most vessels, was a short, thick-set Portuguese, almost as dark as an Indian, but the very picture of good-nature. He now stepped up behind the skipper so as to have a good view of the baby, whose face, which rested on the skipper’s shoulder, was turned away from the crew, who stood looking at him in a helplessly bewildered way.
At the “doctor’s” sudden appearance the baby stopped crying, began again to suck his thumb, and, with great, wide-open eyes, stared solemnly at the grinning figure to whom it was thus introduced.
“Him hongry, skip,” announced the “doctor.” “Me fix him, pret quicka, bimeby, right off. Got one lit tin cow lef. You fetcha him down.”
The “doctor,” who was named Mateo, declared afterwards that the moment he looked into the baby’s face the little one had winked at him, as much as to say, “You know what I want, old chap, now go ahead and get it.”