Читать книгу Seibert of the Island - Gordon Young - Страница 18

Williams did not enter Pulotu bay. He landed through the surf on the other side of the narrow island, about a mile below the slope where Waller had built his house.

McGuire had never been so miserable on a voyage as on this one, but he had only increased misery by the way it ended; and all because of John Paullen.

"What of him?" Williams had demanded, with the merest jerk of a thumb, toward Paullen in the dawn of the first morning out of San Francisco. He had been watching Paullen. The boy then stood amidships, with something of the loneliness in his face that the landsman feels when he sees the shore-line vanishing for the first time.

"West Point, skipper. Kicked out—head first. Family chopped him off. Oo-ey—git! Just that way, like a stray dog. Father told him to take some other name. Just what he did I don't know—yet. But you see for yourself, skipper, he's the sort that wouldn't cheat at cards, steal a horse, hurt a woman. He must have thrown a book at a teacher. Well, he was on the waterfront without a friend or a dollar. Hell-ward bound in any case. I thought he might as well come along with us."

"You told him?" Williams's eye struck hard.

"Not a word!" said McGuire quickly, sensing trouble.

"He thinks all ships go to sea by being rowed out in the dark."

"You, you knowing he runs the risk of imprisonment—and worse!"

"But, skipper, time and again I've brought men aboard when we could use them. And I thought——"

"Not his kind!"

"If I had told him he would have come, anyhow. He isn't the kind that quits if——"

"If you had told me he would not have come."

"But you let Nada come, and——"

"That was to pay Penwenn in bitter coin. He loves her. With less than half the truth told, no court would hold her. But this boy——"

McGuire then told Paullen the truth—who the skipper was, the ship he was on, the risk he ran by being there; and Paullen accepted the circumstances, not with any degree of cheerfulness, but at least without a word of reproach. But McGuire every day increasingly felt that he had lost favour with Williams.

Then Paullen one day, jumping aloft in a squall—as he really had no business to do, being the greenest of sailors—had a fall that nearly knocked the life out of him, and which did fracture a rib or two. Though he was carefully stowed away in a bunk, with Nada to wait on him, Paullen did his best to sicken and die; and, being a stubborn young fellow, he nearly succeeded. At least, that was how it appeared to McGuire.

But one of the witchcraft-like mysteries of the sea has to do with sick men such as Paullen, who very often, for not much of any reason at all, will turn up their toes and waste away unless a land breeze freshens their faces. They grow wistfully indifferent, for Death is a kindly old hag in some ways, and often she makes the sick man like a hungry child, eager to be snuggled to even her empty dugs.

True, there were Paullen's ribs; but these knitted away as young bones do. He had the land-fever, and his sense of disgrace worked on his spirits, so that much of the time he was out of his head and talked of home.

In order that Paullen might as soon as possible be detached from any connection with piracy, Williams from the first day at sea had intended to put him ashore at Pulotu; but, after the boy became ill, McGuire was given to understand that he, too, would be put ashore.

Williams as much as said: "You got him into this. You go on shore and see that he gets out of it, too. Stay by him. A boy such as he would waste his life by settling down on an island like Pulotu, so you see that he keeps clear of that sort of thing!"

McGuire understood perfectly; but he tried to point out that Paullen should not be ashore at all; that Nada would have him all to herself, flat on his back, helpless. Williams glared and made a gesture of impatient dismissal.

McGuire had always got along so easily with the rigorous Williams because of a nearly complete understanding of his character, and he had known that a boy of Paullen's type would at once engage his sympathy, but he had miscalculated its extent and nature.

McGuire did not like the outlook. He had no eagerness to go through a month and more of the dirty, stinking work of oyster fishing, for Williams was going on after shell since he had a debt to pay, and would pay it as best he could; but Pulotu was not even a good place to loaf. However, it was the best place at which a sick boy could be put on shore that the Flying Gull (now no longer the Flying Gull, but the Hans Haasbruck—for Williams often used the name of another ship, as it did much to confuse those who searched for him) for many a long month perhaps would be near. It was bad enough to be responsible for one who was sick, but he foresaw that Paullen was sure to be much harder to look after if he got well; and his mission, the place where he was going, with its great, dark, rotting house and uncared-for grounds, his separation from Williams, and almost every condition that he anticipated, dispirited McGuire.