Drew's face brightened.
"Yes, indeed. Now I understand why I've never seen you," he said. "Your mother told me that you had not been home for more than two years. I've not been here so long. She is very cheerful in her loneliness; I often stop in to talk to her."
"Yes," answered Medbury, soberly; "she told me. It does her lots of good. She thinks a great deal of you." He paused a moment, and then said: "I've promised her to take no more long voyages. She's getting old, and I'm all she's got."
"That's good," said Drew, heartily. He was very fond of the bright-faced old woman who had lived to see the covetous ocean take all but her youngest boy, and was quite prepared to like her son for her sake.
III
The Henrietta C. March was a brig of five hundred tons burden, and was bound for Santa Cruz in the West Indies; and Captain March had stopped off his home port to take aboard his wife and daughter and Drew, who had been given a long vacation by his church. The mate of the brig had been taken suddenly ill, and for two days the captain had been trying to get a man to fill his place.
It was with an impression of almost Crusoe-like loneliness that Drew found himself upon the deck when they reached the brig at last, and the mate, with the crew at his heels, had gone forward to swing the boat to her place on the center-house, and then to the windlass to heave the chain short. Drew set his baggage down on the deck and, walking forward, watched the men heaving at the windlass, the jar and clank of which filled the vessel. On the quarter-deck the captain, in his shirt-sleeves and wearing a shapeless brown hat, walked back and forth, occasionally glancing aloft at the fly, which was beginning to straighten out in the freshening southwest breeze. His wife and daughter were nowhere in sight.
The clank of the windlass grew slower and slower as the cable shortened, and every moment or two Medbury glanced over the bow. Finally he raised his hand above his head, and the men came trooping down from the forecastle-deck, some going aloft to loosen sails and others going to various stations with a businesslike directness that seemed to Drew to be under the guidance of wordless intuition. He stood leaning against the fore-rigging as two came toward him with the unseeing look of men who, having a duty to perform, recognize no obstacle, and, gently pushing him aside, began to throw to the deck the coils of running rigging against which he had been leaning. He moved from place to place, always finding himself in the way and being pushed aside with the silent directness that seemed purely impersonal, until at last, throwing off his coat, he began to pull with the rest. In silence they made place for him. For a time he found his hands catching awkwardly at halyards and braces and slipping over and under other harder hands; then at last he caught the swing, and his body rose and sank with the bodies of the others, and his breathing came heavily and thickened with theirs. The minister had found himself.