“’Tis terrible inconvenient for both of us. Here we are, aboard a kind of a Flying Dutchman that must go dancin’ and dodgin’ about the high seas with every man’s hand against her. And you are no more anxious to quit me than I am to see the last of you.”
“But—but—it is absolutely impossible,” stammered Van Steen. “Think of the ladies——”
“They have my room, and the bit of an upper deck will be sacred to them.”
O’Shea stepped to the galley door, but Van Steen detained him with a question.
“What about me? Can I negotiate for a state-room?”
“Yes, indeed; it is on the overhang with two sacks of coal for a mattress, and ye should be thankful ’tis soft coal and not anthracite. Ye may find the suite a trifle crowded, but by kicking a few patriots in the ribs you can make room for yourself.”
II
In the refuge of the captain’s room that distraught spinster, Miss Hollister, was overcome by emotions almost hysterical. Her first impressions of the Fearless had been in the nature of a nervous shock more severe than the episode of the shipwreck. Only the presence of her niece restrained her from tears and lamentations. Nora Forbes, the young person in question, was behaving with so much courage and self-possession as to set her aunt a most excellent example.
“Oh, did you ever see anything so dreadful?” moaned Miss Hollister, glancing at the captain’s shaving-glass and absently smoothing her gray hair. “There was a dead negro stretched on deck, and a white man all covered with blood, and the captain not in the least excited, actually joking about it——”
Miss Nora Forbes artfully coaxed her aunt away from the bit of mirror and proceeded to arrange her own disordered tresses as though this were more important than damp skirts and wave-soaked stockings. With hairpins twain between her pretty lips, she replied, and her accents were by no means hopeless: