"Where are we now?"

"Sure, we're afloat on the say, acushla; where else would we be?"

"Where's uncle?"

"He's beyant there in the long-boat--he'll be afther us in a minit."

"I want a drink."

He filled a tin pannikin that was by the beaker of water, and gave her a drink. Then he took his pipe and tobacco from his coat pocket.

She almost immediately fell asleep again beside d.i.c.k, who had not stirred or moved; and the old sailor, standing up and steadying himself, cast his eyes round the horizon. Not a sign of sail or boat was there on all the moonlit sea.

From the low elevation of an open boat one has a very small horizon, and in the vague world of moonlight somewhere round about it was possible that the boats might be near enough to show up at daybreak.

But open boats a few miles apart may be separated by long leagues in the course of a few hours. Nothing is more mysterious than the currents of the sea.

The ocean is an ocean of rivers, some swiftly flowing, some slow, and a league from where you are drifting at the rate of a mile an hour another boat may be drifting two.

A slight warm breeze was frosting the water, blending moonshine and star shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest mainland was perhaps a thousand miles away.

The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts, but not longer than the thoughts of this old sailor man smoking his pipe under the stars.

Thoughts as long as the world is round. Blazing bar rooms in Callao--harbours over whose oily surfaces the sampans slipped like water-beetles--the lights of Macao--the docks of London. Scarcely ever a sea picture, pure and simple, for why should an old seaman care to think about the sea, where life is all into the fo'cs'le and out again, where one voyage blends and jumbles with another, where after forty-five years of reefing topsails you can't well remember off which ship it was Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or who it was killed who in the fo'cs'le of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror darkly, the fight, and the b.l.o.o.d.y face over which a man is holding a kerosene lamp.

I doubt if Paddy b.u.t.ton could have told you the name of the first ship he ever sailed in. If you had asked him, he would probably have replied: "I disremimber; it was to the Baltic, and cruel cowld weather, and I was say-sick till I near brought me boots up; and it was 'O for ould Ireland!' I was cryin' all the time, an' the captin dhrummin me back with a rope's end to the tune uv it--but the name of the hooker--I disremimber--bad luck to her, whoever she was!"

So he sat smoking his pipe, whilst the candles of heaven burned above him, and calling to mind roaring drunken scenes and palmshadowed harbours, and the men and the women he had known--such men and such women! The derelicts of the earth and the ocean. Then he nodded off to sleep again, and when he awoke the moon had gone.

Now in the eastern sky might have been seen a pale fan of light, vague as the wing of an ephemera. It vanished and changed back to darkness.

Presently, and almost at a stroke, a pencil of fire ruled a line along the eastern horizon, and the eastern sky became more beautiful than a rose leaf plucked in May. The line of fire contracted into one increasing spot, the rim of the rising sun.

As the light increased the sky above became of a blue impossible to imagine unless seen, a wan blue, yet living and sparkling as if born of the impalpable dust of sapphires. Then the whole sea flashed like the harp of Apollo touched by the fingers of the G.o.d. The light was music to the soul. It was day.

"Daddy!" suddenly cried d.i.c.k, sitting up in the sunlight and rubbing his eyes with his open palms. "Where are we?"

"All right, d.i.c.ky, me son!" cried the old sailor, who had been standing up casting his eyes round in a vain endeavour to sight the boats. "Your daddy's as safe as if he was in hivin; he'll be wid us in a minit, an'

bring another ship along with him. So you're awake, are you, Em'line?"

Emmeline, sitting up in the old pilot coat, nodded in reply without speaking. Another child might have supplemented d.i.c.k's enquiries as to her uncle by questions of her own, but she did not.

Did she guess that there was some subterfuge in Mr b.u.t.ton's answer, and that things were different from what he was making them out to be? Who can tell?

She was wearing an old cap of d.i.c.k's, which Mrs Stannard in the hurry and confusion had popped on her head. It was pushed to one side, and she made a quaint enough little figure as she sat up in the early morning brightness, dressed in the old salt-stained coat beside d.i.c.k, whose straw hat was somewhere in the bottom of the boat, and whose auburn locks were blowing in the faint breeze.

"Hurroo!" cried d.i.c.k, looking around at the blue and sparkling water, and banging with a stretcher on the bottom of the boat. "I'm goin' to be a sailor, aren't I, Paddy? You'll let me sail the boat, won't you, Paddy, an' show me how to row?"

"Aisy does it," said Paddy, taking hold of the child. "I haven't a sponge or towel, but I'll just wash your face in salt wather and lave you to dry in the sun."

He filled the bailing tin with sea water.

"I don't want to wash!" shouted d.i.c.k.

"Stick your face into the water in the tin," commanded Paddy. "You wouldn't be going about the place with your face like a sut-bag, would you?"

"Stick yours in!" commanded the other.

b.u.t.ton did so, and made a hub-bubbling noise in the water; then he lifted a wet and streaming face, and flung the contents of the bailing tin overboard.

"Now you've lost your chance," said this arch nursery strategist, "all the water's gone."

"There's more in the sea."

"There's no more to wash with, not till to-morrow--the fishes don't allow it."

"I want to wash," grumbled d.i.c.k. "I want to stick my face in the tin, same's you did; 'sides, Em hasn't washed."

"I don't mind," murmured Emmeline.

"Well, thin," said Mr b.u.t.ton, as if making a sudden resolve, "I'll ax the sharks." He leaned over the boat's side, his face close to the surface of the water. "Halloo there!" he shouted, and then bent his head sideways to listen; the children also looked over the side, deeply interested.

"Halloo there! Are y'aslape? Oh, there y'are! Here's a spalpeen with a dhirty face, an's wishful to wash it; may I take a bailin' tin of-- Oh, thank your 'arner, thank your 'arner--good day to you, and my respects."

"What did the shark say, Mr b.u.t.ton?" asked Emmeline.

"He said: 'Take a bar'l full, an' welcome, Mister b.u.t.ton; an' it's wishful I am I had a drop of the crathur to offer you this fine marnin'.' Thin he popped his head under his fin and went aslape agin; leastwise, I heard him snore."

Emmeline nearly always "Mr b.u.t.toned" her friend; sometimes she called him "Mr Paddy." As for d.i.c.k, it was always "Paddy," pure and simple.

Children have etiquettes of their own.

It must often strike landsmen and landswomen that the most terrible experience when cast away at sea in an open boat is the total absence of privacy. It seems an outrage on decency on the part of Providence to herd people together so. But, whoever has gone through the experience will bear me out that the human mind enlarges, and things that would shock us ash.o.r.e are as nothing out there, face to face with eternity.

If so with grown-up people, how much more so with this old sh.e.l.l-back and his two charges?

And indeed Mr b.u.t.ton was a person who called a spade a spade, had no more conventions than a walrus, and looked after his two charges just as a nursemaid might look after her charges, or a walrus after its young.

There was a large bag of biscuits in the boat, and some tinned stuff--mostly sardines.

I have known a sailor to open a box of sardines with a tin tack. He was in prison, the sardines had been smuggled into him, and he had no can-opener. Only his genius and a tin tack.

Paddy had a jack-knife, however, and in a marvellously short time a box of sardines was opened, and placed on the stern-sheets beside some biscuits.

These, with some water and Emmeline's Tangerine orange, which she produced and added to the common store, formed the feast, and they fell to. When they had finished, the remains were put carefully away, and they proceeded to step the tiny mast.

The sailor, when the mast was in its place, stood for a moment resting his hand on it, and gazing around him over the vast and voiceless blue.

The Pacific has three blues: the blue of morning, the blue of midday, and the blue of evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest: the happiest thing in colour--sparkling, vague, newborn--the blue of heaven and youth.

"What are you looking for, Paddy?" asked d.i.c.k.