Chapter 19 - Page 2

your
cannibals."

So it was that Joan stood beside Sheldon and sighed as she watched
the Martha beating out to sea, old Kinross, brought over from Savo,
in command.

"Kinross is an old fossil," she said, with a touch of bitterness in
her voice. "Oh, he'll never wreck her through rashness, rest
assured of that; but he's timid to childishness, and timid skippers
lose just as many vessels as rash ones. Some day, Kinross will
lose the Martha because there'll be only one chance and he'll be
afraid to take it. I know his sort. Afraid to take advantage of a
proper breeze of wind that will fetch him in in twenty hours, he'll
get caught out in the calm that follows and spend a whole week in
getting in. The Martha will make money with him, there's no doubt
of it; but she won't make near the money that she would under a
competent master."

She paused, and with heightened colour and sparkling eyes gazed
seaward at the schooner.

"My! but she is a witch! Look at her eating up the water, and
there's no wind to speak of. She's not got ordinary white metal
either. It's man-of-war copper, every inch of it. I had them
polish it with cocoanut husks when she was careened at Poonga-
Poonga. She was a seal-hunter before this gold expedition got her.
And seal-hunters had to sail. They've run away from second class
Russian cruisers more than once up there off Siberia.

"Honestly, if I'd dreamed of the chance waiting for me at Guvutu
when I bought her for less than three hundred dollars, I'd never
have gone partners with you. And in that case I'd be sailing her
right now.

The justice of her contention came abruptly home to Sheldon. What
she had done she would have done just the same if she had not been
his partner. And in the saving of the Martha he had played no
part. Single-handed, unadvised, in the teeth of the laughter of
Guvutu and of the competition of men like Morgan and Raff, she had
gone into the adventure and brought it through to success.

"You make me feel like a big man who has robbed a small child of a
lolly," he said with sudden contrition.

"And the small child is crying for it." She looked at him, and he
noted that her lip was slightly trembling and that her eyes were
moist. It was the boy all over, he thought; the boy crying for the
wee bit boat with which to play. And yet it was a woman, too.
What a maze of contradiction she was! And he wondered, had she
been all woman and no boy, if he would have loved her in just the
same way. Then it rushed in upon his consciousness that he really
loved her for what she was, for all the boy in her and all the rest
of her--for the total of her that would have been a different total
in direct proportion to any