Captain Bowditch was on deck almost all the time. His better seamanship began to be displayed now. He took advantage of every flaw in the wind. He had us making sail, and reefing down, most of the time, and Bob Promise grumbled that we topmen had better stay up there in the rigging all the time, and have our meals brought to us by the cook.
We saw nothing of the Seamew, and that added to our anxiety, too. Days passed and we crossed the line, under the heat of a tropical sun that fairly stewed the pitch out of the deck planks. Dao Singh seemed the only person aboard that accepted the heat with good temper.
We rigged an awning for our passenger, and Phillis lived under it both day and night. She was getting plump and hearty, however; surely the voyage was doing her no harm. And she was the sweetest tempered, jolliest little thing one could imagine. It cheered a fellow up and made him ashamed to be grouchy, just to be near her.
She liked Thankful Polk, and he amused her by the hour. The officers were pretty easy on Thank and I as long as we were with her. To me she clung as though I really was her brother—and I was proud that she so favored me.
Phillis told me much of her life in India—as far back as she could remember it. She had come out from England when she was very small. On her last birthday she had been twelve. But little that she could tell me would help in finding her relatives—if she had any.
Her father, Captain Erskin Duane, had not been in active service. Not as far as she knew, at least. He had been an invalid for months; but had died very suddenly. There seemed to have been few army friends, and the people she had sailed with from Calcutta she had hardly ever seen before the captain’s death.
I had tried pumping Dao Singh about the private history of the little girl; but either he knew nothing about the captain’s affairs, or he would not tell me. He was as simple, apparently, as a child about his own expectations. He had insisted upon accompanying the little Memsahib in her voyage “because she needed him.” Why he thought she needed him he could not, or would not, explain.
For my part I told Phillis everything about myself, and recounted, from time to time, all the adventures through which I had been since leaving Bolderhead. I told her much about my mother, too, and about Darringford House, and our summer home on Bolderhead Neck.
I assured her that I should take her at once to my mother when we landed and that I knew my mother would be delighted to give her a home with us. This seemed to please the little girl greatly.
“Then we shall really be brother and sister, sha’n’t we?” she cried.