When the old cook noted a lifting of the cloud on Dan’s face, he spoke, for Sooey Wan was one of those rare men who never speak out of their turn.
“Captain of schooner velly nice man. Wha’ for you no rentum schooner? Plenty money hab got.”
Dan’s long arm rested affectionately across Sooey Wan’s shoulders. “You dad-fetched old heathen, what would I do without you? You’re the shadow of a rock in a weary land. Let’s go.”
Together they went—out to the Pelorus. Her master, seated on deck under an awning with a glass of grog before him, smiled as they came over the rail.
“I’ve been expecting you, Mr. Pritchard. I was ready to sail at four this afternoon, but something told me I’d best wait. It’s about five hundred miles out of my way, but if you will insist on going to Riva I might as well have the job as anybody. Mighty few vessels cruise down that way. You might be hung up here for six months. Passage for two will cost you two thousand dollars.”
“Hab got,” said Sooey Wan promptly, and shed his duck coat. Up out of his linen trousers came his shirt tail and around his middle showed a wide money belt. This he unbuckled and gravely counted out two thousand dollars into the master’s palm.
“Now I go ketchum baggage,” he announced and went ashore. Half an hour later the Pelorus, in tow of a launch, was slipping out of the harbor. Once in the open sea, she heeled gently to the trade wind and rolled away into the southwest in the wake of the Doris Crane.
CHAPTER XXVII
Pelorus proved to be a comfortable and seaworthy vessel and her master (his name was Hackett) a most comfortable and seaworthy person. Although plainly hungry for a more intellectual brand of masculine society than ordinarily was to be found in the out-of-the-way places he visited, he tactfully forbore to obtrude upon Dan’s mood of depression until quite certain that he was not obtruding—whereupon he would become a most delightful and entertaining companion. His besetting sin was Scotch and soda, albeit he resolutely declined, when at sea, to touch a drop before five o’clock in the afternoon and while he helped himself liberally until the steward announced dinner, the liquor never appeared to affect him. It developed that he and Gaston of the Beard had been warm friends. Hackett’s admiration for the old Breton skipper had been very profound.
One day he said suddenly to Dan: “You have an unasked question in the back of your head, Mr. Pritchard. You need not bother to ask it. I shall answer it, however. Old Gaston Larrieau was my friend. We stood back to back, once, and shot our way out of rather a dirty mess in the New Hebrides; I was wounded and unconscious at the finish and he swam with me half a mile through shark-infested waters to his ship. I am what I am and rather less than that in port, but I behave myself at sea and I have a long memory. Tamea was as nice a girl when she left the Pelorus as she was when she came aboard. I wasn’t fixed to accommodate a woman passenger, but to such as I had she was welcome and no questions asked.”