The Wavecrest was bowling along nicely so I could give my attention to the big ship, which I soon made out to be the Peveril. Old Tom was right. She was one of the Bayne Line ships, coming from Boston—coming from home, as you might say! To tell the truth, I was a good bit home-sick.
I let my mind wander back to Bolderhead. Circumstances had made it possible for me to leave the Scarboro, and I was now nearing Buenos Ayres where I had written my mother to cable me money at the American consul’s bureau. I had got enough of whaling. Adventure and travel is all right; but I had had a taste of it, and found it to be merely an alias for hard work!
“It’s me for home on the first steamship going north,” I told myself, wisely. “I’ve had adventure enough to last me a while.”
I was sailing on the Silver River, as the exploring Spaniards had first called this noble stream, and there might be a lot of fun and hard work ahead of me if I remained with old Tom and Ben Gibson until they rejoined the Scarboro. But I wasn’t tied to them. I’d probably have plenty of money with which to pay my passage home; and just then I wanted to see my mother, and Ham Mayberry, and lots of other folk in Bolderhead, more than I wanted to be knocking about in strange quarters of the world.
I glanced around at the steamship again. She had almost caught up to us, for although the sloop had a fair wind, the Peveril was sailing three lengths to our one. On and on she came, the smoke pouring from her stacks. Her high, rusty side loomed up not more than a cable’s length away. I could see the passengers walking on her upper decks, and the officers on her bridge. Below, the ports were open, their steel shutters let down on their chains like drop-shelves.
Some of the crew were looking out idly upon the Wavecrest as the steamship slipped by. A cook in a white cap came to one port and threw some slop into the sea. As he emptied the bucket my eyes roved to the very next port aft. There somebody sat peeling vegetables. I could see the flash of the knife in the sunlight, and the long paring of potato peel curling off the knifeblade.
It was an idle glance I had turned upon the vegetable peeler. He was only a cook’s apprentice, or scullion. There was no reason why my gaze should have fastened upon him with interest. Yet my eyes lingered, and suddenly the fellow raised his head and his face was turned toward the open port.
The mental shock I experienced made me inattentive to my helm and the Wavecrest fell off. Old Tom sang out to know what I was about, and silently I brought the sloop’s nose back again. The steamship had slipped by us and the wake of her set the little craft to jumping.
My mind was in a fog. I steered mechanically. The face I had seen at the open port of the Peveril was still before me, as in a vision. I knew I had not been tricked by any hallucination. I had not even been thinking of the fellow at the time. And I was sure that the cook’s assistant aboard the Peveril had not seen and recognized me.
But I could not be mistaken in my identification of that face at the port. It was that of my cousin, Paul Downes—Paul Downes, here on the de la Plata, thousands of miles from home, and evidently working in the menial position of cook’s helper on the steamship, Peveril! Is it to be wondered that I was amazed?