“We can safely say in about two months,” Kit replied, “if all goes well. And by that time I think we ought to have an answer from New Zealand.”
Those two days at home were many hours too short, but there was no help for it. Kit had nearly two months’ wages to hand over to his mother, and after taking a good look at the outside of the house he suggested that she should get some one to mend the two or three broken places and then have it painted.
“That will not cost very much,” he said, “for it is a small house. And if—if that should—well, you know what I mean. We want everything looking nice if he comes home.”
Silas did not go down to Bridgeport with his stage in time to catch the 9.15 train, the one that Kit wanted to take; so he walked down as he had walked up, glad to have another two or three hours among the green fields after so much blue water.
From the time of his reaching New York again the young supercargo had very little time to himself until the North Cape cleared for Marseilles, for the cargo began to arrive next day, and he had to give his attention to it.
“It hardly seems to me as if we had been home,” he said to Captain Griffith as they stood on the bridge, watching the gradual fading away of the Navesink Highlands. “They keep us going so fast; to-day in Barbadoes, to-morrow in London, next day in Marseilles. I see you have the ‘Count of Monte Cristo’ among your books, Captain. I will get you to let me read it when I am through with my work. I have been reading everything I could find about Marseilles.”
“Oh, yes, you can take it,” the Captain answered. “You will find it a very interesting story, particularly when you are bound for Marseilles. But there is something about it that to me is of more interest than the story itself. I won’t tell you what it is; you can find that out for yourself.”
For four or five days Kit was busy with his manifests, but after that his time was his own, except for an occasional visit to the hold to see that his cargo was in good order—his “magic oil,” he called it; for as far as he could make out it was to go into Marseilles nothing but plain cotton-seed oil, and return to New York “pure olive-oil,” worth two dollars a gallon.
The ocean seemed a vast desert of water on this voyage. They were far out of the usual track of vessels crossing the Atlantic, except those bound for the far East by way of the Suez Canal; and in the eighteen days before Gibraltar was sighted they passed only three sails. But in those days Kit put all his papers in order and read the “Count of Monte Cristo” with great care.
“I should not have spent so much time on an ordinary story,” he said when it was finished, “but this tells so much about Marseilles. And I wanted to find out what you considered of more interest about it than the story itself.”