Part 10

“Yes, sir.”

“He requests you to turn in toward shore and follow that course.”

“Very well, sir.” Captain Mayo walked to the wheel. “Nor' nor'west, Billy, until I can give you the exact course.”

“Nor' nor'west!” repeated the wheelsman, throwing her hard over, and the Olenia came about with a rail-dipping swerve and retraced her way along her own wake of white suds.

Miss Marston preceded the captain down the ladder and went into the chart-room. “A kiss--quick!” she whispered.

He held her close to him for a long moment.

“You are a most obedient captain,” she said.

When he released her and went at his task, she leaned upon his shoulder and watched him as he straddled his parallels across the chart.

“We'll run to Razee Reef,” he told her, eager to make her a partner in all his little concerns. “The Bee boats fetch the whistler there so as to lay off their next leg. I didn't know that Mr. Marston was interested in the Bee line.”

“I heard him talking about that line,” she said, indifferently. “Sometimes I listen when I have nothing else to do. He used a naughty word about somebody connected with that company--and it's so seldom that he allows himself to swear I listened to see what it was all about. I don't know even now. I don't understand such things. But he said if he couldn't buy 'em he'd bu'st 'em. Those were his words. Not very elegant language. But it's all I remember.”

Before he left the chart-room Mayo took a squint at the barometer. “I'm sorry he has ordered me in toward the coast,” he said. “The glass is too far below thirty to suit me. I think it means fog.”

“But it's so clear and beautiful,” she protested.

“It's always especially beautiful at sea before something bad happens,” he explained, smiling. “And there has been a big fog-bank off to s'uth'ard for two days. It's a good deal like life, dear. All lovely, and then the fog shuts in!”

“But I would be happy with you in the fog,” she assured him.

He glowed at her words and answered with his eyes.

She would have followed him back upon the bridge, but the steward intercepted her. He had waited outside the chart-room.

“Mr. Marston's compliments, Miss Marston! He requests you to join him at cards.”

She pouted as she gave back Mayo's look of annoyance, and then obeyed the mandate.

Mr. Marston was stroking his narrow strip of chin beard with thumb and forefinger when she arrived on the quarter-deck. The men of business were below, and he motioned to a hammock chair beside him.

“Alma, for the rest of this cruise I want you to stay back here with our guests where you belong,” he commanded with the directness of attack employed by Julius Marston in his dealings with those of his ménage.

“What do you mean, father?”

“That--exactly. I was explicit, was I not?”

“But you do not intimate that--that I have--”

“Well?” Mr. Marston believed in allowing others to expose their sentiments before he uncovered his own.

“You don't suggest that there is anything wrong in my being on the bridge where I enjoy myself so much. I am trying to learn something about navigation.”

“I am paying that fellow up there to attend to all that.”

“And it gets tiresome back here.”

“You selected your own company for the cruise--and there is Mr. Beveridge ready to amuse you at any time.”