"'Got who?' says Tim.

"'The moon,' says he.

"'Got her where?' says Tim.

"'In a bucket down by the pond,' says t'other, 'safe an' sound an' not a scratch on her; you come and look,' says he. So Tim follows him, he hobblin', and they goes to the pond side, and there, sure enough, stood a tin bucket full of wather, an' on the wather the refliction of the moon.

"'I dridged her out of the pond,' whispers Buck. 'Aisy now,' says he, 'an' I'll dribble the water out gently,' says he, 'an' we'll catch her alive at the bottom of it like a trout.' So he drains the wather out gently of the bucket till it was near all gone, an' then he looks into the bucket expectin' to find the moon flounderin' in the bottom of it like a flat fish.

"'She's gone, bad 'cess to her!' says he.

"'Try again,' says me brother, and Buck fills the bucket again, and there was the moon sure enough when the water came to stand still.

"'Go on,' says me brother. 'Drain out the wather, but go gentle, or she'll give yiz the slip again.'

"'Wan minit,' says Buck, 'I've got an idea,' says he; 'she won't give me the slip this time,' says he. 'You wait for me,' says he; and off he hobbles to his old mother's cabin a stone's-throw away, and back he comes with a sieve.

"'You hold the sieve,' says Buck, 'and I'll drain the water into it; if she 'scapes from the bucket we'll have her in the sieve.' And he pours the wather out of the bucket as gentle as if it was crame out of a jug.

When all the wather was out he turns the bucket bottom up, and shook it.

"'Ran dan the thing!' he cries, 'she's gone again'; an' wid that he flings the bucket into the pond, and the sieve afther the bucket, when up comes his old mother hobbling on her stick.

"'Where's me bucket?' says she.

"'In the pond,' say Buck.

"'And me sieve?' says she.

"'Gone afther the bucket.'

"'I'll give yiz a bucketin!' says she; and she up with the stick and landed him a skelp, an' driv him roarin' and hobblin' before her, and locked him up in the cabin, an' kep' him on bread an' wather for a wake to get the moon out of his head; but she might have saved her thruble, for that day month in it was agin. . . . There she comes!"

The moon, argent and splendid, was breaking from the water. She was full, and her light was powerful almost as the light of day. The shadows of the children and the queer shadow of Mr b.u.t.ton were cast on the wall of the caboose hard and black as silhouettes.

"Look at our shadows!" cried d.i.c.k, taking off his broad-brimmed straw hat and waving it.

Emmeline held up her doll to see ITS shadow, and Mr b.u.t.ton held up his pipe.

"Come now," said he, putting the pipe back in his mouth, and making to rise, "and shadda off to bed; it's time you were aslape, the both of you."

d.i.c.k began to yowl.

"_I_ don't want to go to bed; I aint tired, Paddy--les's stay a little longer."

"Not a minit," said the other, with all the decision of a nurse; "not a minit afther me pipe's out!"

"Fill it again," said d.i.c.k.

Mr b.u.t.ton made no reply. The pipe gurgled as he puffed at it--a kind of death-rattle speaking of almost immediate extinction.

"Mr b.u.t.ton!" said Emmeline. She was holding her nose in the air and sniffing; seated to windward of the smoker, and out of the pigtail-poisoned air, her delicate sense of smell perceived something lost to the others.

"What is it, acushla?"

"I smell something."

"What d'ye say you smell?"

"Something nice."

"What's it like?" asked d.i.c.k, sniffing hard. "_I_ don't smell anything."

Emmeline sniffed again to make sure.

"Flowers," said she.

The breeze, which had shifted several points since midday, was bearing with it a faint, faint odour: a perfume of vanilla and spice so faint as to be imperceptible to all but the most acute olfactory sense.

"Flowers!" said the old sailor, tapping the ashes cut of his pipe against the heel of his boot. "And where'd you get flowers in middle of the say? It's dhramin' you are. Come now--to bed wid yiz!"

"Fill it again," wailed d.i.c.k, referring to the pipe.

"It's a spankin' I'll give you," replied his guardian, lifting him down from the timber baulks, and then a.s.sisting Emmeline, "in two ticks if you don't behave. Come along, Em'line."

He started aft, a small hand in each of his, d.i.c.k bellowing.

As they pa.s.sed the ship's bell, d.i.c.k stretched towards the belaying pin that was still lying on the deck, seized it, and hit the bell a mighty bang. It was the last pleasure to be s.n.a.t.c.hed before sleep, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed it.

Paddy had made up beds for himself and his charges in the deck-house; he had cleared the stuff off the table, broken open the windows to get the musty smell away, and placed the mattresses from the captain and mate's cabins on the floor.

When the children were in bed and asleep, he went to the starboard rail, and, leaning on it, looked over the moonlit sea. He was thinking of ships as his wandering eye roved over the sea s.p.a.ces, little dreaming of the message that the perfumed breeze was bearing him. The message that had been received and dimly understood by Emmeline. Then he leaned with his back to the rail and his hands in his pockets. He was not thinking now, he was ruminating.

The basis of the Irish character as exemplified by Paddy b.u.t.ton is a profound laziness mixed with a profound melancholy. Yet Paddy, in his left-handed way, was as hard a worker as any man on board ship; and as for melancholy, he was the life and soul of the fo'cs'le. Yet there they were, the laziness and the melancholy, only waiting to be tapped.

As he stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, longsh.o.r.e fashion, counting the dowels in the planking of the deck by the moonlight, he was reviewing the "old days." The tale of Buck M'Cann had recalled them, and across all the salt seas he could see the moonlight on the Connemara mountains, and hear the seagulls crying on the thunderous beach where each wave has behind it three thousand miles of sea.

Suddenly Mr b.u.t.ton came back from the mountains of Connemara to find himself on the deck of the Shenandoah; and he instantly became possessed by fears. Beyond the white deserted deck, barred by the shadows of the standing rigging, he could see the door of the caboose.

Suppose he should suddenly see a head pop out or, worse, a shadowy form go in?

He turned to the deck-house, where the children were sound asleep, and where, in a few minutes, he, too, was sound asleep beside them, whilst all night long the brig rocked to the gentle swell of the Pacific, and the breeze blew, bringing with it the perfume of flowers.

CHAPTER X

THE TRAGEDY OF THE BOATS

When the fog lifted after midnight the people in the long-boat saw the quarter-boat half a mile to starboard of them.