“‘I can’t wait no longer,’ says he. ‘I wants t’ know. An’ I’m so near, now,’ says he, ‘that I ’low I’ll just find out.’
“‘Hold fast, you fool!’ says I.
“I swear by the God that made me,” Tumm declared, “that he was smilin’ the last I seed of his face in the foam! He wanted t’ know—an’ he found out! But I wasn’t quite so curious,” Tumm added, “an’ I hauled my hulk out o’ the water, an’ climbed aboard. An’ I run aft; but they wasn’t nothin’ t’ be seed but the big, black sea, an’ the froth o’ the schooner’s wake and o’ the wild white horses.”
The story was ended.
A tense silence was broken by a gentle snore from the skipper of the Good Samaritan. I turned. The head of the lad from the Cove o’ First Cousins protruded from his bunk. It was withdrawn on the instant. But I had caught sight of the drooping eyes and of the wide, flaring nostrils.
“See that, sir?” Tumm asked, with a backward nod toward the boy’s bunk.
I nodded.
“Same old thing,” he laughed, sadly. “Goes on t’ the end o’ the world.”
We all know that.