‘Yes, sir; we worked day and night. Of course we was all ready for sea, but there would be many things a-wanting for what might turn out a six or seven thousand mile run with ne’er a stoppage along the whole road of it.’
My eye was just then taken by something that glittered upon the mainmast within reach of a man’s uplifted arm. I peered, imagining it to be a little plate with an inscription upon it commemorating something that Wilfrid might have deemed worthy of a memorial. I caught Finn grinning.
‘D’ye see what it is, sir?’ said he.
I looked again, and shook my head. He walked to the mast, and I followed him, and now I saw that it was a handsome five-guinea piece, obviously of an old date—but it was too high to distinguish the impress clearly—secured by a couple of little staples which gripped without piercing or wounding it.
‘That piece of money,’ said Finn, ‘is for the first man that sights the “Shark.”’
‘Ha!’ I exclaimed, ‘an old whaling practice. My cousin has not viewed the world for nothing!’
It was but a trifling thing, yet in its way it was almost as hard a bit of underscoring of my cousin’s resolution as the long grinning piece they were cleaning forward, or the stand of arms against the bulkhead below.
‘What’s the pace, captain?’
‘A full ten, sir, by the last heave of the log.’
I fell a-whistling—for it was grand sailing, surely—with a lift of my eye to the topgallant sail that lay stowed in a snow-white streak with a proper man-of-war’s bunt amidships on the slender black yard.