“I am sorry to intrude,” he added stiffly; “but when a man is sick, he must be taken care of. Captain Rowan, in there, doesn’t half know where he is, nor what he is about. I will get him away as soon as I can. You shall be paid for your trouble.” He tossed a silver piece down between the two. “When I come back, you shall have more,” he said, and, turning his back upon them, walked off into the woods.
Neither of the two elders stirred till he was out of sight; but Malie slipped from her tree, darted at the money, and snatched it up. She was escaping with it, when her father seized her, took the money from her hand, and put it into his pocket. She only laughed when he let her go. She had no use for money, except to wear it on a string around her neck, and a string of beads was prettier. Besides, she had her treasure—the book the lady had given her that day. She threw herself on the ground, near the fire, drew this book from the loose folds of her blouse, and turned the leaves, reading here and there. The page looked like all sorts of bird-songs written out. Doubtless the birds and beasts had had a good deal to do with making the language of it. Who would not think that k’tchitbessùwìnoa was a
verse from a feathered songster? Malie would tell you that it means a “general.” Probably the birds call their generals by that name. One looks with interest on a child who can read this chippering, gurgling, twittering, lisping, growling “to-whit, to-whoo!” of a thought-medium.
While she read, Captain Cary, tramping through the strip of woods between the encampment and South Street, recollected for the first time that his clothes were dripping wet. “What a queer, topsy-turvy time we are having!” he muttered, wringing the water from his cravat, as he hurried along. “The whole affair reminds me of that fairy play I saw last winter. There must be something unwholesome in this moonshine.”
The play he meant was Midsummer-Night’s Dream. But there was now no clamor of rustic clowns in a hawthorn brake, nor sight of Titania sleeping among her pensioners the cowslips. There were but his own steps, muffled in moss, and the lurking shadows, creeping noiselessly away from the pursuing light.
By that short road across the Point, it was less than half a mile to the wharf where the Halcyon lay, and in ten minutes Captain Cary had reached his ship. His crew were all on board, and, as he walked down the wharf, he heard the refrain of one of their songs:
“And they sank him in the lowlands, low.”
The verse ended in that mournful cadence that sailors learn from the ocean winds—those long-breathed, full-throated singers!
At sound of the captain’s step, silence fell, and at his call a little imp of a Malay cabin-boy appeared, stood with twinkling eyes to take his orders, then shot away to execute them. When the sailor who had gone up to the bridge with the ladies
came back to the ship, the yawl was out, and Captain Cary sat in it waiting for him.