The farewell between Nora Forbes and Captain O’Shea had been said on the beach in the starlight. Now their glances met.
“Good-by and God bless ye,” said he. “The voyage seems like a dream, no doubt.”
“Perhaps it may some day, but not yet,” she told him.
“My dear friends, that voyage was the realest thing that ever happened,” was the earnest declaration of Johnny Kent, and no dissent was heard from that shipwrecked and marooned spinster, Miss Katharine Hollister.
THE KING OF TRINADARO
I
Captain Michael O’Shea and Johnny Kent sat by a window of the Jolly Mermaid tavern at Blackwall on the Thames below London. These two leisurely drank mugs of bitter-beer and gazed with professional interest at the crowded shipping of that great seaport thoroughfare which sailor-folk call London River.
The Jolly Mermaid was one of a jostling row of ancient buildings with bow-windows and balconies painted in bright hues which overhung the tide at Blackwall, to remind one of the maritime London of towering frigates and high-pooped galleons and stout seamen of Devon. The near-by shore was filled with ship-yards and weedy wharves, and a little way down river was the entrance of the vast inland basin called the East India Docks, where soared a wonderful confusion of spars and rigging, and the red funnels of the Union Castle liners lay side by side.
On the turbid river moved in procession a singular variety of craft: drifting Thames barges with dyed sails, square-riggers in tow, Norwegian tramps half hidden beneath uncouth deck-loads of lumber, rusty Spanish fruiters, coastwise schooners, spray-stained steam-trawlers from the Dogger Bank, stubby Dutch eel-schuits, stately mail-boats homeward bound from the tropics, sooty colliers from Cardiff.
They slid past with an incessant din of whistles which, warning, expostulating, shouted the rules of the road in the language of the sea.