“Huh!” grunted Boyle. “Reminds me of a skipper I once sailed with, bound from Rotterdam to Hull in ballast. There was a Scotch mist best part of the trip, an’ the old man loaded with schnapps to keep out the damp. First time he got a squint of the sun he went as yaller as a Swede turnip. ‘It’s all up with us, boys,’ he said. ‘My missus is forty fathoms below. We’ve just sailed over York.’ You see, he’d made a mistake of a few degrees.”
“Boyle,” said Courtenay, severely, “what has come to you? Are you actually making a joke?”
“I think I must have bin tongue-tied before, captain.”
“Before what?”
“Before that lame duck in the fo’c’sle stuck his tobacco-cutter into my jaw. I can talk like a prize parrot now—can’t I, Miss Maxwell?”
Elsie was laughing, but she remembered the subject on which Boyle had displayed his new-found power of speech; and human parrots are apt to say too much.
“Please don’t tell any more funny little stories,” she cried, “or I shall be putting dots in the wrong places.”
“And causing us to waste time scandalously. Are you ready, Miss Maxwell? Let me pin this compass card on the table. Use the parallel ruler; regard each inch as a mile, and I’ll do the rest by guesswork.”
Courtenay took his binoculars, and went on to the bridge. He called out the apparent distance of each landmark he could distinguish, described it, and gave its true bearing. In the result, Elsie found she had prepared a clear and fairly accurate chart of the bay and its headlands, while the position of the distant range of mountains was marked with tolerable precision. But Courtenay was far from being satisfied.
“If I had a base line, or even a fresh set of points taken higher up the inlet, I could improve on my part of the survey,” he said. “Yours is admirable, Miss Maxwell. Of course, I know you are an artist; but mapping is a thing apart. That is first-rate.”