When at last Henry Harper came to himself he found he was in the arms of Mr. Thompson. The Old Man with the devil in his eyes was standing by; all around the Horn he had been drinking heavily. Mr. MacFarlane, Mr. Petersen the third mate, and some of the others were also standing by.
The boy heard the Old Man threaten to put Mr. Thompson in irons, and heard him call him a mutinous dog. Mr. Thompson made no reply, but no dog could have looked more mutinous than he did as he held the boy in his arms. There was a terrible look on his face, and Mr. MacFarlane and the others held back a bit.
It chanced, however, that there was just one thought at the back of the Old Man's mind, and it was this that saved Mr. Thompson, also the boy and perhaps the ship. He feared no man, he had no God when he was in drink, and he didn't set much store by the devil as a working institution; but drunk or sober he was always a first-rate seaman and he cared a great deal about his ship. And he knew very well that except himself Mr. Thompson was the only first-rate seaman aboard the _Margaret Carey_, and that without his aid there was little chance of the vessel reaching Frisco. It was this thought at the back of the Old Man's mind that prevented his putting Mr. Thompson in irons.
The boy lay longer than he knew, hovering much nearer to death than he guessed, in Mr. Thompson's bunk, with Mr. Thompson's spare oilskins over him, his dry blankets under him, and Mr. Thompson moistening his lips with grog every few minutes for several hours. It was a pretty near go; had Henry Harper known how near it was he might have taken his chance. But he didn't know, and in the course of two or three days nature and Mr. Thompson and perhaps a change in the weather pulled him through.
All the way out from London until the third day past the Horn the weather had been as dirty as it knew how to be; and it knows how to be very dirty indeed aboard a windjammer on the fifty-sixth degree of latitude in the month of December, which is not the worst time of the year. But it suddenly took quite a miraculous turn for the better. The wind allowed Mr. Thompson to shift the course of the _Margaret Carey_ a couple of points in two hours, so that before that day was out the old tub, which could not have been so crazy as she seemed to Henry Harper, was running before it in gala order with all her canvas spread.