"I didn't sleep," said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. "I'se very sleepy now."
She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and Mother and Joyce looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious face.
"God help us," said Mother in a whisper. "What is the truth of this?"
There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan's. And she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.
IV
A MAN BEFORE THE MAST
In Tom Mowbray's boarding-house, the sailors who sat upon the narrow benches round the big room ceased their talk as the door opened and Tom Mowbray himself entered from the street. The men in the room, for all the dreary stiffness of their shore-clothes, carried upon their faces, in their hands shaped to the rasp of ropes, in every attitude of their bodies, the ineradicable hall-mark of the sea which was the arena of their lives; they salted the barren place with its vigor and pungency. Pausing within the door, Tom Mowbray sent his pale inexpressive glance flickering along the faces they turned towards him.
"Well, boys," he said; "takin' it easy fer a spell?"
There was a murmur of reply from the men; they watched him warily, knowing that he was not genial for nothing. He was a man of fifty or more, bloated in body, with an immobile grey face and a gay white moustache that masked his gross and ruthless mouth. He was dressed like any other successful merchant, bulging waistcoat, showy linen and all; the commodity in which he dealt was the flesh and blood of seamen, and his house was eminent among those which helped the water-front of San Francisco "the Barbary Coast," as sailors call it to its unholy fame. He stood among the sunburnt, steady-eyed seamen like a fungus in fresh grass.
"An' now, who's for a good ship?" he inquired. There was a sort of mirth in his voice as he spoke. "Good wages, good grub, an' a soft job. Don't all of ye speak at once."