Three thousand miles away a lad in sailor blue was mending awnings on a liner's deck. He did not look happy as he plied the sail-needle with vicious jabs, while he thought, half aloud:
"What is the use of having friends if you can't be of any use to them? What good have I been to Captain John and Margaret? Always wanting to help, never doing a thing! I might have got him a ship if I hadn't hung fire so long. Now it's too late. I wish I had never set eyes on those Cochrans. I just amused them, because I was a kind of curiosity, I suppose."
It was a very different David Downes who whooped like a red Indian soon after he went off watch. After dancing along the deck with a cabled message in his fist, he sat down on the edge of his bunk to think things over. Slowly the fact of Captain John's great good fortune slipped into the background, and bigger and bigger loomed the certainty which he could not bear to face.
"A whole year without seeing Margaret," he said to himself, "for she is sure to go in the Sea Witch. I never realized what it would mean to have them go to sea again. They must take me, too; I can't bear to be left behind. A whole year without Margaret!"
Then it came over him that he belonged where he had begun, in steam, in the Atlantic service. He was of a different age and breed of seaman from Captain John. Their ways must part. But was not any sacrifice worth while that would give him a chance to sail with Margaret? David was suddenly brought face to face with a new problem which had come into his life without his being aware of it. He must fight it out for himself.
CHAPTER X THE CALL OF DUTY
Captain John Bracewell's deep voice was shouting orders to the tug which was making fast to haul the deep-laden Sea Witch out from her wharf. She was ready to begin her long voyage around Cape Horn, and the trade winds of the Pacific were calling her. In their first hours aboard, her crew had found that they were in a "smart ship," with a master who knew his trade. No longer a stranded derelict, but a leader of men, gravely rejoicing in the strength and beauty of the Sea Witch, Captain Bracewell looked every inch a proper seaman to command this queen of the old-time Yankee merchant marine.