"Meeting up with you, however, is about the strangest streak of luck I have happened with yet. But I am none the less glad to fall in with one of my own kin. You're as welcome to me, lad, as I reckon we were to you and Duff, the morning we sighted you off the Cape Verdes. When he told me who you were I was all broke up. You were pretty well done for."
"I guess I must have given you some trouble since then," returned Ralph, reaching for his uncle's hand. "We did have rather a tough time in that old boat."
"You did that. As soon as you were hoisted aboard, Dr. Barker pronounced you down with coast fever. That trip up the river Duff tells me about, probably planted the seeds, and exposure did the rest—eh, Doc."
The surgeon nodded, then the chief quartermaster added: "But we will be at Norfolk in a week, then I'll apply for shore leave and you and I will go down and see the old man."
"He won't want to see me," remarked Ralph, who then briefly related the circumstances under which he had been driven from home, his encounter with Shard, and the latter's mode of placing him at Gary's mercy.
The old warrant officer laughed over the silly feud, while sympathizing with the boy over its sad results.
"You shall take me home," he concluded. "Father will forgive us both and we'll liven the old gent up a bit. Perhaps we can get him down where he can taste a whiff of salt air, especially if I make a man-'o-war's man out of his grandson."
The doctor now interposed, and said that Ralph had talked, and been talked to, enough that day. So the boy was left to another refreshing sleep, after enjoying his bowl of chicken broth.
Two days later he was out on deck, where the neatness, precision, and martial splendor of everything he saw, quite captivated his young imagination. When they entered the harbor at Fortress Monroe and salutes were fired, yards manned, and flags dipped by the Adams and the friendly foreign war ships anchored there, Ralph felt more than ever that his vocation was that of a sailor.
True to his word, Uncle Gideon soon started with his nephew for the old mountain home that he had not seen for more than thirty years. When Ralph stood aside, and the stern old man gazed upon his first born, the meeting and recognition were touching in the extreme.