A GHOST WALKS
"Ever take much interest in gasoline engines?" Curlie suddenly inquired of Joe.
"Yes, quite a bit; had a shift on one of those marine kinds last summer on the Great Lakes."
"Good! You'll have to take a shift here on the Kittlewake. This trip can't be made without sleep. I'll spell the captain at the wheel and you can relieve that lanky engineer."
Again they lapsed into silence. Half unconsciously each boy was taking stock of the craft they had requisitioned, trying to judge whether or not she was equal to the task she had been put to. Speed she had in plenty. "Do forty knots a 'our," the skipper put it, "an' never 'eat a bearin'."
She was a trim craft. Narrow of beam, a two-master with a steel hull that stood well out of the water forward, she rode the water with the repose and high glee of the bird she was named after.
"Yes, she's a beauty, and a go-getter," Curlie was thinking to himself, "but in a storm, now, four or five hundred miles from land, what then?"
Had he known how soon his question was to be answered he might well have shuddered.
"Better go down and have a look at the engines before you turn in for a wink of sleep," he told Joe.
When Joe had gone below, Curlie still sat there on the rail aft. The throb of the engines beneath him, the rapid rush of air that fanned his cheek, was medicine to his weary brain. He had been caught in a whirlwind of events and here, for a time, he had been cast down in a quiet place where his mind might clear itself of the wreckage of thought that had been torn up and strewn about within it.