"Why didn't you hang on to them, Jim?"
The big sailor hung his head. "I got to drinkin', Cap'n. You know how I used to hit it up. Hardy got me into a poker game, and when all my money was gone, I put up my oyster-beds and he got them, too. I reckon he had a crooked deck, too."
"I reckon you're right. Everything about that fellow seems to have been crooked."
For a time there was silence. The Shark sailed swiftly on. She was now well up the river. Soon the solitary light at Bivalve shone close at hand. Then the shipper laid the Shark skilfully alongside the pier. They bade good night to Hawley, and in another moment Alec and the shipper were bowling homeward in the captain's motor-car. At least it seemed to Alec as though he were going home.
It seemed even more like home when the shipper threw open the door and ushered Alec into the big house. For his own mother and sister could hardly have given Alec a more cordial welcome than Mrs. Rumford and Elsa gave him. Despite that welcome Alec suddenly became self-conscious and bashful. He was embarrassed by the warmth of the greeting given him. Also he saw in Elsa's eyes a light he had never seen there before. Had he but known it, a similar light was shining in his own eyes. His heart beat with strange and unaccustomed irregularity. More than once he flushed like a schoolgirl. He felt curiously awkward and at the same time unaccountably happy. Now he realized that Elsa would never be the same to him in future as she had been in the past. His lonely vigil in the dark, his hour of supreme danger when only the hand of this girl comrade thrust out through the night had saved him from death, had revealed to him the inner meaning of the friendship that had sprung up between them.
A question arose in his mind, a question that seemed more important to him than anything else in the world. Yet he could not ask that question, and he knew it would be a long, long time before he dared. Still he did not need to ask any question to learn his answer. He could read it in Elsa's eyes. The hour of peril, when she had sat in mute apprehension, listening, listening, listening, breathless in her fear, had told Elsa also that she could never again think of Alec in the old way.
So, although Alec at first was unaccountably ill at ease, he was happier than he had ever been in his life. He was happy in what he saw in Elsa's eyes. He was also happy in the thought that he had been true to the shipper, that he had not betrayed the captain's confidence, that he had really saved his friend and benefactor from great loss. And that was no little thing for a lad still in his teens.
Of course time went by unobserved. Nobody at that Rumford household cared a farthing that night how fast the time went or how late it was. Once more Alec had to relate every incident in connection with his adventure, from the moment he left the Rumford house in the early evening to the moment he returned to it after his rescue from the oyster pirates.
When all the story had been dragged from the reluctant lad, the shipper once more expressed his opinion of Alec's folly in wasting his time over the silly notion that a microscope and a thimbleful of sea water would tell him anything about the value for oyster-culture of a piece of land three fathoms under the waves. Instantly Elsa flew to Alec's defense.