“That was a little different,” Kit exclaimed. “I was doing a supercargo’s work when I was cabin boy, and I had to go ashore on business. But I think the Captain will let you go up to town if you ask him. I know he likes you, from the way he speaks of you. You’re a very different boy, Harry, if you don’t mind my saying so, from what you were when you came on board. We all have to learn, I suppose, that we don’t get things for favors, but by working for them, and you are doing your work well.”
“Thawnk you very much, Mr. Supercargo!” Harry retorted, taking off his cap in mock humility. “I like to be appreciated by my superiors.”
“Well, it’s a fact,” Kit laughed. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. All this stuff on the wharf will be aboard by two or three o’clock, and if you like I will ask the Captain to let you go up to London with me after that. You know it is daylight here till eight or nine o’clock in the evening.”
“Hooray for you!” Harry shouted. “If you ask, it’s a sure thing, for you get whatever you want. I wish I had such a pull with the Captain as you have.”
“I have no ‘pull’ at all—” Kit started to say; but he was interrupted by footsteps on the companionway, and a moment later Captain Griffith entered the cabin with a handful of letters.
“There seems to be something for most everybody in this lot,” he said, laying the letters upon the big table and looking them over. “Captain Griffith, Captain Griffith, Mr. Mason, Mr. Christopher Silburn, Mr. Hanway, Mr. Christopher Silburn—here are two for you, Silburn, so your folks have not forgotten you.”
Kit saw at a glance that one of the letters was from his mother and the other from Vieve; and the one from his mother was so large and thick that it rather alarmed him. He went to the corner of the long sofa and hurriedly opened it, and found two enclosures, besides a page or two in his mother’s handwriting.
“We are so flustered by these letters that we don’t know what to do,” Mrs. Silburn wrote. “But your sister and I both think that the best thing will be to send them right over to you, so that you will be sure to get them before you leave London. We have kept copies, in case they should be lost. Oh, Kit, do you think there is any chance that this man may be your dear father? I am afraid it is only exciting our hopes in vain, but we ought to do something about it, though we don’t know what. How could we ever get along without a great, big man like our Kit to advise us?”
After reading this mysterious introduction Kit turned hurriedly to the enclosures. The first was on a sheet headed “Bryant & Williams, Bridgeport, Conn.,” whom he immediately recognized as the owners of his father’s schooner, the Flower City.
Mrs. Christopher Silburn, Huntington, Conn. [the letter began]:
Please find enclosed a copy of a letter we have just received from the State Department at Washington, which explains itself. We have sent similar copies to the families of all the members of the crew of the schooner Flower City, as far as they are known. While we have slight hopes that the person referred to in the letter may have been a member of that unfortunate crew, we deem it only right to lay the information before you, that you may take whatever measures seem to you proper.
Very respectfully yours,
Bryant & Williams.