“That’s fine. Really, the Captain is a great and grand man.” Mrs. Duke was warm in her praise.
Sally told all she knew. Danny’s mother beamed her gratitude. But as she rose to go, a wrinkle came to her brow. “It’s going to storm,” she said. “I feel it in my bones.”
Sally didn’t say: “That will be bad for Danny.” She said nothing at all, just watched the older woman as she walked out into the night.
Those had been strange, hard days for Danny. He was not long in learning that there is nothing so lonely as an empty sea. “If I get out of this alive,” he told himself, “I’ll always carry some book with thin pages and lots of reading, a Bible, a volume of Shakespeare, just anything.”
His threatened storm turned into a gentle shower. Spreading out his coat, he caught a quart of water and poured it into a rubber bottle. The supply of water that could be produced by his still, he knew, was limited, and this might be a long journey.
That he was slowly going somewhere, he knew well enough. Winds and currents would see to that. Perhaps he would in time come to land. What land? Some wild, uninhabited island, a friendly shore, or beneath an enemy’s frowning fortifications? He shuddered at the thought.
At times he tried reciting poetry. One verse amused him:
“‘This is the ship of pearl, which poets feign, sails the unshadowed main.’ It’s a rubber ship,” he told himself, “but why quibble over small details?”
As he recalled the poem it ended something like this: