"Well, you and your sisters seem to have spoiled the young scamp. When they brought him up from below he whimpered out that the young ladies had been kind to him, and he didn't like carrying luggage and cleaning railway lamps, and when he heard that you were coming to sea he wanted his mother to get me to take him as a cabin-boy. She boxed his ears. But he found out when you were leaving, and hid in a goods wagon that reached Southampton a little before we did, and watched his opportunity to slip on board when the barque was lying at the quay-side. That's all I got out of him; and the motion served him as it serves most landsmen, and he dropped asleep just where you see him there. I'll have something to say to him when he wakes."
"Poor little fellow!" said Tommy. "You won't be hard on him, Uncle?"
The Captain grunted. Perhaps he remembered that fifty years before he had himself run away to sea.
"A rascally young stowaway," he muttered. "I can't put him ashore, as I shan't touch at any port this side of Buenos Ayres. And his mother crying her eyes out, I'll be bound. And I'll have to spend several shillings on a cable to tell her he's safe. A pretty thing for a man with three nieces."
"I'll pay for the cable, Uncle."
"What! has she damaged the cable?" asked Mary innocently, coming up at this moment.
Captain Barton shook with laughter.
"Oh, you bookworms!" he said, when he had command of his breath. "Take a look at the cable, Mary, and see if you think Tommy, for all her mischievousness, could do it much damage. No, 'tis another kind of cable we were speaking of—all along of young Samson there. What would you do with a stowaway, Bess?" he asked of his eldest niece, who had just joined the others.
"Good gracious!" exclaimed Elizabeth, "you were right after all, Tommy. What a little sweep he looks!"
At this moment Dan stirred, opened his eyes, and when he saw the girls smiled sheepishly.