"Jing, you gave me a scare, Dan!" said Freddy, drawing a long breath of
relief. "I thought you had dropped overboard."
"Overboard!" scoffed Dan. "You must think I'm a ninny. And you have been
sleeping sure! Got to keep this sort of thing up all summer?"
"Oh, no, no!" said Freddy; "only for a few days,--until I get real well
and strong; though Brother Bart will keep fussing over me, I know. Golly,
I wish we had Uncle Tom along with us!"
"All right, is he?" asked Dan.
"Great!" replied Freddy, emphatically. "Doesn't baby you a bit; lets you
row and swim and dive when you go off with him. Most as good as a real
father."
"_Just_ as good, I guess," amended Dan.
"No," said Freddy, shaking his head. "You see, he has other
work--preaching and saying Mass and giving missions--where I don't come
in. He has to leave me at Saint Andrew's because he hasn't any home. It
must be just fine to have a home that isn't a school,--a sort of cosy
little place, with cushioned chairs, and curtains, and a fire that you can
see, and a kitchen where you can roast nuts and apples and smell
gingerbread baking, and a big dog that would be your very own. But you
can't have a home like that when you have a priest uncle like mine."
"No, you can't," agreed Dan, his thoughts turning to Aunt Winnie and her
blue teapot, and the little rooms that, despite all the pinch and poverty,
she had made home.
"And Christmas," went on Freddy, both young speakers being quite oblivious
of the big stranger who had seated himself on a camp stool in the shelter
of the projecting cabin, and, with folded arms resting on the deck rail,
was apparently studying the distant horizon,--"I'd like to have one real
right Christmas before I get too big for it."
"Seems to me you have a pretty good time as it is," remarked Dan: "new
skates and sled, and five dollars pocket money. There wasn't a fellow at
the school of your age had any more."
"That's so," said Freddy; "but they went _home_. A fellow doesn't want
pocket money when he goes home. Dick Fenton had only sixty cents; I lent
him fifteen more to get a card-case for his mother. But he had Christmas
all right, you bet: a tree that went to the ceiling (he helped to cut it
down himself); all the house 'woodsy' with wreaths and berries and
fires,--real fires where you could pop corn and roast apples. He lives in
the country, you see, where money doesn't count; for you can't buy a real
Christmas; it has to be homemade," said Freddy, with a little sigh. "So
I'll never have one, I know."
Then the great gong sounded again to announce supper; and both boys
bounded away to find the rest of their crowd, leaving the big stranger
still seated in the gathering darkness, looking out to sea. As the boyish
footsteps died into silence, he bowed his head upon his hands, and his
breast heaved with a long, shuddering breath as if some dull, slumbering
pain had wakened into life again. Then, in fierce self-mastery, he rose,
stretched his tall form to its full height, and, ascending to the upper
deck, began to pace its dimming length with the stern, swift tread of one
whose life is a restless, joyless march through a desert land.
Meanwhile Brother Bart and his boys had begun to feel the roll of the sea,
and to realize that supper had been a mistake. Jim and Dud had retired to
their staterooms, with unpleasant memories of Minnie Foster's chocolates,
and the firm conviction that they never wanted to see a candy box again.
Brother Bart was ministering to a very white-faced "laddie," and thanking
Heaven he was in the state of grace and prepared for the worst.
"The Lord's will be done, but I don't think any of us will live to see the
morning. There must have been some poison in the food, to take us all
suddint like this."
"Oh, no, Brother Bart!" gasped Freddy, faintly. "I've been this way
before. We're all just--just seasick, Brother Bart--dead seasick."
Even Dan had a few qualms,--just enough to send him, with the sturdy sense
of his rough kind, out into the widest sweep of briny air within his
reach. He made for a flight of stairs that led up into some swaying,
starlit region where there were no other sufferers, and flung himself upon
a pile of life-preservers that served as a pillow for his dizzy head.
Sickness of any sort was altogether new to Dan, and he felt it would be
some relief to groan out his present misery unheard. But the glow of a
cigar, whose owner was pacing the deck, suddenly glimmered above his head,
and the big man in corduroy nearly stumbled over him.
"Hello!" he said. "Down and out, my boy? Here, take a swig of this!" and
he handed out a silver-mounted flask.
"No," said Dan, faintly, "--can't. I've taken the pledge."
"Pooh! Don't be a fool, boy, when you're sick!"
"Wouldn't touch it if I were dying," said Dan. "I'm getting better now,
anyhow. My, but I felt queer for a while! It is so hot and stuffy below.
No more packing in on a shelf for me. I'll stick it out here until
morning."
"And the others,--the little chap who was with you?" the stranger asked
hastily. "Is he--he sick, too?"
"Freddy Neville? Yes, dead sick; but Brother Bart is looking out for him.
Brother Bart is a regular old softy about Freddy. He took him when he was
a little kid and keeps babying him yet."
"He is good to him, you mean?" asked the other, eagerly.
"Good? Well, I suppose you'd call it good. I couldn't stand any such
fussing. Why, when Fred got a tumble in the gym the other day the old man
almost had a fit!"
"A tumble,--a fall; did it hurt him much?" There was a strange sharpness
in the questioner's voice.
"Pooh, no!" said Dan. "Just knocked him out a little. But we were all
getting into trouble at Saint Andrew's, for vacation there is pretty slow;
so Father Regan has sent us off to the seashore for the summer?"
"The seashore? Where?"
"Some queer place called Killykinick," answered Dan, who was now able to
sit up and be sociable.
"Killykinick?" repeated his companion, in a startled tone. "Did you say
you were going to Killykinick?"
"Yes," answered Dan. "Freddy's uncle or cousin or somebody died a while
ago and left him a place there. Freddy has a lot of houses and money and
things all his own. It's lucky he has. He isn't the kind to rough it and
tough it for himself. Not that he hasn't plenty of grit," went on Freddy's
chum, hastily. "He's as plucky a little chap as I ever saw. But he's been
used to having life soft and easy. He is the 'big bug' sort. (I ain't.) So
I'm glad he has money enough to make things smooth at the start, though
his no-'count father did skip off and leave him when he was only five
years old."
"His father left him?" repeated Dan's companion. "Why?"
"Don't know," answered Dan. "Just naturally a 'quitter,' I guess. Lots of
menfolks are. Want a free foot and no bother. But to shake a nice little
chap like Freddy I call a dirty, mean trick, don't you?"
"There might be reasons," was the hesitating rejoinder.
"What reason?" asked Dan, gruffly. "There ain't any sort of reason why a
father shouldn't stick to his job. I hate a 'quitter,' anyhow," concluded
Dan, decisively.
"Wait until you are twenty years older before you say that, my boy!" was
the answer. "Perhaps then you will know what quitting costs and means. But
you're an old chum for that little boy. I saw him with you down below. How
is it that you're such friends?"
And then Dan, being of a communicative nature, and seeing no cause for
reserve, told his new acquaintance all about the scholarship that had
introduced him into spheres of birth and breeding to which he frankly
confessed he could make no claim.
"I'm not Freddy's sort, I know; but he took to me somehow,--I can't tell
why."
Yet as Dan went on with his simple, honest story, his listener, who,
world-wise and world-weary as he was, knew something of the boyish nature
that turns instinctively to what is strong and true and good, felt he
could tell why Freddy took to this rough diamond of a chum.
Dan, in his turn, learned that his new acquaintance was called John Wirt;
that he was off on a vacation trip, hunting and fishing wherever there was
promise of good sport; that he had travelled abroad for several
years,--had been to China, Japan, India, Egypt; had hunted lions and
elephants, seen the midnight sun, crossed Siberian steppes and African
deserts. From a geographical standpoint, Mr. Wirt's story seemed an open
and extensive map, but biographically it was a blank. Of his personal
history, past, present or future, he said nothing. Altogether, Dan and his
new acquaintance had a pleasant hour on the open deck beneath the stars,
and made friends rapidly.
"I wish you were going our way," said Dan, regretfully, as his companion
announced that he was to get off at the first point they touched. "Brother
Bart is going to granny us all, I know. If we had a real strong man like
you around, he wouldn't scare so easily. And there is fine fishing about
Killykinick, they say."
"So I have heard." The stranger had risen now, and stood, a tall shadow
dimly outlined above Dan. "I--I--perhaps I'll drop in upon you. Isn't it
time for you to turn in now?"
"No," answered Dan,--"not into that packing box below. I'm up here for the
night."
"And I'm off before morning, so it's good-bye and good luck to you!"
And, with a friendly nod, Mr. John Wirt strode away down the darkened
deck, leaving Dan to fling himself back upon his life-preservers, and
wonder how, when, or where he had seen their new acquaintance before,--not
at Saint Andrew's; for Mr. Wirt had been abroad, as he had said, ever
since Dan entered the college; not at Milligans' or Pete Patterson's, or
anywhere about his old home. Perhaps he had blacked his shoes or sold him
a newspaper in some half-forgotten past; for surely there was something in
his tone, his glance, his friendly smile that Dan knew.
He felt quite well now. All the dizziness and nausea had vanished, and he
was his own strong, sturdy self again. The roll and swap of the boat were
only the rock of a giant cradle; the surge of the sea, a deep-toned
lullaby soothing him to pleasant dreams; and the sky! Dan had never seen
such a midnight sky. He lay, with his head pillowed in his clasped hands,
looking up at the starry splendor above him with a wonder akin to awe. The
great, blue vault arching above him blazed with light from a myriad stars,
that his books had told him were worlds greater than this on whose wide
waters he was tossing now,--worlds whose history the wisest of men could
never know,--worlds, thousands and millions of them, moving in shining
order by "rule and law."
"Rule and law,"--it was the lesson that seemed to face Dan
everywhere,--down in those black depths he had penetrated to-day, where
valve and lever and gauge held roaring fire and hissing steam, with all
their fierce force, to submission and service; in the polished mechanism
whose steady throb he could feel pulsing beneath him like a giant heart;
in the radiant sky where worlds beyond worlds swept on their mysterious
way--obeying.
With half-formed thoughts like these stirring vaguely in his mind, Dan was
dropping off into pleasant sleep, when he was roused by the sound of
voices and the glimmering of a ship's lantern.
"I think you will find your boy here, sir."
It was Mr. John Wirt, who, with the aid of a friendly deck hand, was
guiding a pale, tottering, very sick Brother Bart to Dan's side.
"Who wants me?" asked the half-wakened Dan, springing to his feet.
"Dan Dolan! Ye young rapscallion!" burst out Brother Bart, almost sobbing
in his relief. "It's down at the bottom of the black sea I thought ye
were. I've been tramping this boat, with this good man holding me up (for
I'm too sick to stand), this half hour. Down wid ye now below stairs with
the rest, where I can keep an eye on ye. Come down, I say!"