“You—you,” Cordie started up.
“Yes, miss,” James grinned. “I know I look as if I’d come in from a long and stormy voyage. My deck needs swabbin’ down and my sails a furlin’, but I’ll be shipshape and ready to take another cruise before the clock can strike eight bells.”
This talk sounded so quaint to the girl that she quite forgot the recent danger James had been in, and sat staring at him as he thrust his head into a huge basin of water and proceeded to scrub it with a course brush, much as one might some huge vegetable.
By the aid of a comb and whisk broom, he succeeded in making himself presentable.
“Now,” he smiled a broad smile, “your Uncle James, once a seaman and now a land fighter, is ready to pilot you home. What’s the port?”
“Sixty-first and Drexel,” said Cordie.
“All right. Port ’er bow. We’re off.”
Concerning his recent combat—if there had been a combat—James said not a word. Cordie wondered at this, but eager as she was to know the outcome of the battle, if there had been one, she dreaded quite as much to hear the whole truth. Visions of an inanimate form, lying bruised and bleeding in some dark corner of the stair, set her shuddering. So in the end she asked no question.
Their passage to the upper floor and out of the building was uneventful. The watchman at the door recognized them and allowed them to pass.
Previous to this time James had seemed quiet and uncommunicative, but now as they rattled along on the L train he told her many a wild tale of the sea journeys he had made. In his deep mellow drawl he talked of the whale ship Addler in northern seas; of Eskimo and polar bear and the gleaming northern lights; and then he talked of the Cutter Corwin among the palm shadowed South Sea Islands.