A step sounded on the forward companionway, and Medbury appeared. He glanced past them to the man at the wheel, looked aloft, then walked slowly to the break of the deck. Suddenly he came back and seated himself on the corner of the house near them. Apparently he had wearied of self-suppression.
He was manifestly trying to appear wholly at ease, and he began to talk at once, and very rapidly, like one repeating a speech that had been learned by heart. He spoke of the wind and the run of the vessel, and he told them that they had not touched a sheet for more than sixty hours. He said he hoped that it would last, though he added that he doubted it.
"When ought we to get out, Tom?" asked Hetty. She bit off her thread as she spoke, and, spreading her work on her lap, examined it absent-mindedly.
"If the wind holds, in four or five days," he answered; "but I'm afraid it won't. The sea's beginning to look oily now; the snap has gone out of the wind. We'll be slatting and rolling in a dead calm by the middle of the afternoon. I noticed the change in my bunk, and couldn't sleep."
"I thought sailors could always sleep." This was Hetty's contribution to the conversation as she still studied her work.
"Well, I couldn't," he answered.
"Then we may be three weeks going out," said Drew. "It seems like a long time."
"I was a hundred and twenty days on my last voyage—from Singapore," said Medbury.
"I am beginning to grasp the reason for the sailor's rapt, far-seeing look," said Drew. "It is not strange that he never loses it, with his constant study of invisible signs and meanings. But a hundred and twenty days! What changes may take place in that time!"
"We find changes enough," Medbury answered. "Sometimes I think we sailors are the only things that do not change, except to grow older and sadder. We always hope to find everything just as we left it, but we never do."