She does, though. In the middle of the afternoon tea, the captain himself arrives, declines to have a cup, and says it is really business this time, and he is away. You go down that eternal avenue again, followed by cheerful cries of “No goodbye! we’ll keep your place at dinner,” and in half an hour the green and purple hills of lovely Raratonga are separated from you by a widening plain of wind-ruffled blue waves, and the _Duchess_ is fairly away to Savage Island.
“Miss G--------, have you nearly done your book?”
“Pretty nearly--why?” I ask, looking up from the pages of “John Herring.”
We are a day or two out from Raratonga, but not even one hundred of the six hundred miles that lie between the Cook Group and lonely Niué is compassed as yet. The winds have been lightest of the light, and from the wrong quarter too, until this morning, when we have “got a slant” at last. Now the _Duchess_ is rolling along in her usual tipsy fashion at seven or eight knots an hour, and the china-blue sea is ruffled and frilled with snow. It is hot, but not oppressively so, and I have been enjoying myself most of the morning lounging on a pile of locker cushions against the deck-house, alternately reading, and humming to myself something from Kipling about:
Sailing south on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
Sliding south on the long trail, the trail that is always new.
The pirate captain has been at the wheel for the last two hours, but I have not taken much note of the fact. Our only mate left us in the Cook Group, for a reason not absolutely new in the history of the world (a pretty little reason she was, too); and our bo’sun, who has been giddily promoted to a rank that he describes as “chief officer,” is not exactly a host in himself, though he is a white man. In consequence, the pirate and he have been keeping watch and watch since we sailed--four hours on and four hours off--and, as one or two of our best A.B.s declined to go down to Niué, and most of the others are bad helmsmen, the two whites have been at the wheel during the greater part of their watches.
I have grown quite accustomed to seeing one or other standing aft of the little companion that leads down to the cabin, lightly shifting the spokes in his hands hour after hour. It never occurred to me, however, that I was personally interested in the matter.