“No, you can’t,” agreed Dan, his thoughts turning to Aunt Winnie and her blue teapot, and the little rooms that, despite all the pinch and poverty, she had made home.
“And Christmas,” went on Freddy, both young speakers being quite oblivious of the big stranger who had seated himself on a camp stool in the shelter of the projecting cabin, and, with folded arms resting on the deck rail, was apparently studying the distant horizon,—“I’d like to have one real right Christmas before I get too big for it.”
“Seems to me you have a pretty good time as it is,” remarked Dan: “new skates and sled, and five dollars pocket money. There wasn’t a fellow at the school of your age had any more.”
“That’s so,” said Freddy; “but they went home. A fellow doesn’t want pocket money when he goes home. Dick Fenton had only sixty cents; I lent him fifteen more to get a card-case for his mother. But he had Christmas all right, you bet: a tree that went to the ceiling (he helped to cut it down himself); all the house ‘woodsy’ with wreaths and berries and fires,—real fires where you could pop corn and roast apples. He lives in the country, you see, where money doesn’t count; for you can’t buy a real Christmas; it has to be homemade,” said Freddy, with a little sigh. “So I’ll never have one, I know.”
Then the great gong sounded again to announce supper; and both boys bounded away to find the rest of their crowd, leaving the big stranger still seated in the gathering darkness, looking out to sea. As the boyish footsteps died into silence, he bowed his head upon his hands, and his breast heaved with a long, shuddering breath as if some dull, slumbering pain had wakened into life again. Then, in fierce self-mastery, he rose, stretched his tall form to its full height, and, ascending to the upper deck, began to pace its dimming length with the stern, swift tread of one whose life is a restless, joyless march through a desert land.
Meanwhile Brother Bart and his boys had begun to feel the roll of the sea, and to realize that supper had been a mistake. Jim and Dud had retired to their staterooms, with unpleasant memories of Minnie Foster’s chocolates, and the firm conviction that they never wanted to see a candy box again. Brother Bart was ministering to a very white-faced “laddie,” and thanking Heaven he was in the state of grace and prepared for the worst.
“The Lord’s will be done, but I don’t think any of us will live to see the morning. There must have been some poison in the food, to take us all suddint like this.”
“Oh, no, Brother Bart!” gasped Freddy, faintly. “I’ve been this way before. We’re all just—just seasick, Brother Bart—dead seasick.”
Even Dan had a few qualms,—just enough to send him, with the sturdy sense of his rough kind, out into the widest sweep of briny air within his reach. He made for a flight of stairs that led up into some swaying, starlit region where there were no other sufferers, and flung himself upon a pile of life-preservers that served as a pillow for his dizzy head. Sickness of any sort was altogether new to Dan, and he felt it would be some relief to groan out his present misery unheard. But the glow of a cigar, whose owner was pacing the deck, suddenly glimmered above his head, and the big man in corduroy nearly stumbled over him.
“Hello!” he said. “Down and out, my boy? Here, take a swig of this!” and he handed out a silver-mounted flask.