THE YOUNG SUPERCARGO

BRAIN AND BRAWN SERIES.

  BY WILLIAM DRYSDALE.

  ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES COPELAND.

  =THE YOUNG REPORTER. A Story of Printing House Square.= 300 pages.
      With five full-page Illustrations. Cloth. 12mo. $1.50.

  =THE FAST MAIL. The Story of a Train Boy.= 330 pages. With five
      full-page Illustrations. Cloth. 12mo. $1.50.

  =THE BEACH PATROL. A Story of the Life-Saving Service.= 318 pages.
      With five full-page Illustrations. Cloth. 12mo. $1.50.

  =THE YOUNG SUPERCARGO. A Story of the Merchant Marine.= 352 pages.
      With five full-page Illustrations. Cloth. 12mo. $1.50.

*.* _Other volumes in preparation._

[Illustration: “‘WHY, THIS IS NO WHARF-RAT, OFFICER.’”]

THE YOUNG SUPERCARGO

  A Story of the Merchant Marine

  BY
  WILLIAM DRYSDALE

  _Author of “The Young Reporter,” “The Fast Mail,”
  “The Beach Patrol,” etc., etc._

  ILLUSTRATED BY
  CHARLES COPELAND

  [Illustration: Docendo discimus]

  BOSTON AND CHICAGO
  W. A. WILDE & COMPANY

  COPYRIGHT, 1898,
  BY W. A. WILDE & COMPANY.
  _All rights reserved._

  THE YOUNG SUPERCARGO.

CONTENTS.

  CHAPTER                                        PAGE

        I. KIT SILBURN’S START IN LIFE              9

       II. A VOYAGE TO YUCATAN                     26

      III. A NORTHER ON THE GULF                   44

       IV. KIT’S CONNECTICUT HOME                  61

        V. A BURGLAR IN THE CABIN                  78

       VI. THE STRANGE CASE OF JOHN DOE            97

      VII. KIT BECOMES A SUPERCARGO               109

     VIII. NEWS FROM THE WRECKED SCHOONER         129

       IX. KIT INSPECTS LONDON                    149

        X. A LETTER FROM THE STATE DEPARTMENT     168

       XI. A VOYAGE TO MARSEILLES                 186

      XII. IMPRISONED IN THE CASTLE D’IF          203

     XIII. A VISIT TO NOTRE-DAME-DE-LA-GARDE      221

      XIV. THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER FROM ROME      237

       XV. NEWS FROM NEW ZEALAND                  256

      XVI. KIT LEAVES THE “NORTH CAPE”            272

     XVII. OVERBOARD IN THE PITCH LAKE            287

    XVIII. A VOYAGE TO BERMUDA                    306

      XIX. KIT FINDS HIS FATHER                   324

       XX. LOVE’S YOUNG DREAM IN BARBADOES        340

ILLUSTRATIONS.

                                                                PAGE

  “‘Why, this is no wharf-rat, officer’”       _Frontispiece_     14

  “‘You are young for a supercargo, Señor’”                       48

  “‘Can you take me to No. 32 Fenchurch Street?’”                136

  “‘Here--is the hole he cut through into the priest’s cell’”    211

  “They had a beautiful view of the Mediterranean”               240

THE YOUNG SUPERCARGO.

CHAPTER I.

KIT SILBURN’S START IN LIFE.

A big black steamship lay beside the wharf in front of Martin’s Stores,
in Brooklyn. The cold November night was so dark that from the brick
warehouse, a hundred feet away, hardly anything could be seen of her
but the lantern that swung in her rigging, a faint light that shone
through her cabin portholes, and occasionally one of her tall top-masts
standing out against the pale moon that tried with little success to
show itself between the scudding clouds. It was bitterly cold, for
November; and a stiff wind from the northeast was driving the black
clouds seaward at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour.

The steamer was the _North Cape_, arrived the week before from
Sisal, in Yucatan, with a cargo of hemp in bales. Though everything was
dark and quiet about her on that wintry night, evidences of hard work
in unloading lay all around. The bales had been taken out of her hold
faster than the warehousemen could trundle them into the building, and
the hundred feet of space between wharf and warehouse was littered with
them. Some were piled up in tiers, and others lay scattered about in
confusion.

That open space between the warehouse and the harbor was well sheltered
from the cutting wind; and patrolman McSweeny, of the Brooklyn police,
with ears and fingers tingling found it a warm corner, and made more
frequent visits to it than his duty really required. If he had gone
into one of the neighboring coffee-houses to warm himself, he might
have been caught by the roundsman and fined; but in going through the
brick archway under the building and prowling among the goods on the
wharf in search of tramps or thieves he was strictly obeying orders. So
on the cold November night he paid particular attention to the wharf
of Martin’s Stores, and visited it so often that no burglar in the
neighborhood would have had the least chance.

Patrolman McSweeny had been a Brooklyn policeman long enough to
understand all the favorite police ways of stirring out homeless tramps
who are so desperately wicked as to go to sleep in the warmest corner
they can find. Among such goods as bales of hemp, for instance, he
took his long nightclub and jabbed it into all the dark spaces that
were wide enough for a boy or man to squeeze into. That way, he found,
was certain to produce results, if anybody was there. Either the soft
feeling at the end of the club told him that he had found a victim, or
the vigor with which he poked it made the victim cry out with pain.

For a policeman weighing nearly two hundred pounds, and armed with a
big club and a revolver, patrolman McSweeny, it must be admitted, made
his rounds among the bales with great caution. The ordinary tramp is a
mere bag of dirt for the average policeman to prod and cuff and shake
as he likes; but about ten days before Mr. McSweeny had stirred up two
tramps on that same wharf who had more muscle than most of their clan,
and in their anger they had turned upon him and thrown him overboard.
So he felt that his dignity needed a little polishing up, and he was
ready to polish it up on the next tramp he caught.

And tramps were not his only victims along the wharves. Sometimes he
came across a boy,--a frowsy, ragged, shivering, homeless boy; and
that always gave him great delight, for a boy, unless he is a big one,
is not as troublesome to handle as a hungry and desperate man. Some
policemen have big hearts, and would rather buy a cup of coffee and a
roll for a hungry boy than take him to the station house and lock him
up; but patrolman McSweeny was not of that kind. He was trying to make
a record on “the foorce,” and every arrest added to his laurels.

It was about eleven o’clock when the patrolman made his fourth trip
that evening among the hemp bales. Never very good-natured, he was
particularly cross that night. Something at the station had annoyed
him; and with his aching fingers and one or two draughts of a stronger
beverage than coffee, he was rather a dangerous person to be trusted
at large with a club and a revolver and the authority of law. His next
victim on the wharf of Martin’s Stores was pretty sure to have an
unpleasant time.

He went from pile to pile of the bales, poking his club viciously into
every dark nook and corner, always ready for a sudden attack. And he
had not gone far before he poked something soft, lying between two
bales, and heard a voice cry out, in startled but still sleepy tones:--

“Hey! who’s there?”

The voice was a relief to him, for it was the voice of a boy.

“Git up here, ye young thafe, till I show ye who it is. Will ye come
out or shall I fan yer carcase wid me club?”

In answer to this gentle summons a boy’s head and shoulders appeared
above the bales, and the big policeman seized the section of coat
collar that was visible and snatched the rest of the boy out with a
jerk.

“Stop that! Let go of me!” said the boy.

Such resistance as that almost took the policeman’s breath away. He
was accustomed to having boys beg him to let them off, and promise
to go home, or go to work, or almost anything else, to get out of
his clutches. But here was a boy who demanded his liberty instead
of begging for it. In such a case it would have made no difference,
probably, even if it had been light enough for him to see that instead
of an ordinary vagabond or river thief this boy was clean and well
dressed.

“Lit go av ye, then, is it!” he repeated, giving his prisoner another
shake; “it’s in the cells I’ll lit go av ye, an’ not before, ye young
thafe. Yer caught in de act, an I’ll run yer in.”

“I am no thief,” said the boy, “and you have no business to poke me
with your club or shake me. If you want to arrest me, I will go with
you peaceably; but I have done nothing to be arrested for.”

“Done nothin’!” the policeman exclaimed, letting go of the boy’s collar
and taking him by the sleeve; “didn’t I ketch ye stealin’?”

“What was I stealing?” the boy asked.

“Hemp, av coorse,” said the officer.

Indignant as he was, the boy could hardly help laughing at the idea of
his stealing five hundred pound bales of hemp.

“I was sleeping there,” the boy answered, “because I had nowhere else
to sleep.”

“Thin I’ll give yer a safe place ter slape!” the policeman declared.
“You come wid me;” and he started toward the archway, still holding his
prisoner by the sleeve.

They were just about to turn from the outer end of the arch into the
almost deserted street when they nearly ran into a man who came along
the sidewalk at a swinging gait and turned short about to enter the
dark tunnel.

“Hello, officer; what’s this?” said the man, stopping to look at the
young prisoner under the gas lamp.

“Good avenin’ to you, Captain Griffith,” the policeman answered, in a
very different tone from the one he had used in speaking to the boy.
“It’s one of them loafin’ wharf rats I’ve caught among your bales of
hemp, sir. But I’ll put him where he won’t be sn’akin’ around the
wharves for one while, sure.”

“Why, this is no wharf rat, officer,” the newcomer said, taking the boy
by the shoulder and turning him around under the lamp to have a better
view of him. “He looks like a respectable boy. What were you doing on
the wharf, my boy?”

“I went there to sleep between two of the bales, sir,” the boy replied,
“because I had nowhere else to go.”

“Well, that’s no crime,” said the man; “we all have to sleep somewhere,
I suppose. I think I wouldn’t lock him up just for that, officer. He’s
a decent-looking boy, and I can give him a place to sleep aboard the
ship. It’s no wonder a youngster hunts a warm place on such a night as
this.”

“Af ye think best, Captain,” the policeman readily answered, releasing
his hold on the boy’s arm. “It’s in luck ye are, bye, that Captain
Griffith of the _North Cape_ put in a good word for ye, or ye’d a
been in a cell by this toime. Then I lave the bye with you, Cap’n.”

“Very good,” said the Captain. “Good night, officer; you’ll have cold
work to-night. Come along, my boy.”

The next minute the boy was retracing his steps through the tunnel,
no longer a prisoner, but sure of a warm place to pass the night. He
had no time to wonder why it was that the captain of a freight steamer
had so much influence with the Brooklyn police; and no matter how much
he had wondered he could hardly have guessed the truth, that every
time the _North Cape_ lay at Martin’s Stores policeman McSweeny
received a five-dollar tip for keeping extra watch over her at night.
The big patrolman was too shrewd not to oblige his patron whenever he
could.

Captain Griffith led the way up an inclined gangway to a lower part of
the deck, then up an iron ladder to a higher deck amidships, then down
a companionway to the snug little cabin of the _North Cape_, where
he turned up the big cabin lamp that had been burning dimly. That done,
he threw off his overcoat, sat down in a revolving-chair at the head
of the cabin table, and looked at the boy for several minutes as if he
intended to look right through him, clothes and all.

What he saw standing by the cabin table, hat in hand, was a
manly-looking boy of about sixteen or seventeen, perhaps a little
large for his age, strong of build, with a good honest face and bright
bluish-gray eyes, and wavy dark brown hair, and hands and face bronzed
by the sun.

“No place to sleep, eh?” the Captain asked, at length.

“No, sir,” said the boy.

“What are you doing in Brooklyn without a place to sleep?” the Captain
went on.

“I came to New York to look for work, sir,” the boy replied. “This
afternoon I answered an advertisement in Brooklyn, but did not get the
place.”

“Where do you live?” the Captain asked.

“In Huntington, Connecticut, sir,” the boy replied.

“What’s your name?”

“Christopher Silburn, sir; they call me Kit.”

“And how did you happen to come to New York to look for work without
any money?” the Captain continued.

“I had some money when I came, sir,” Kit answered, “but I have been
here for three days, and it is nearly all gone. What little is left I
am saving to buy food with.”

“Have you no friends?” the Captain asked, looking at Kit’s clothes,
which though evidently not of city make, were clean and whole.

“I have a mother and sister, sir,” he answered, “and it is on their
account that I have come to the city, for they need what I can earn.
My father is dead--at least, I am afraid he is.”

“Afraid he is!” the Captain repeated; “don’t you know whether he is
dead or not?”

“Not for certain, sir,” Kit replied. “He was first mate of the schooner
_Flower City_, which sailed from Bridgeport for New Orleans with
machinery nearly a year ago. She was sighted by a steamer off Hatteras,
but she has never been heard from since, nor any of her crew. She was
given up long ago, and there is hardly any hope.”

“Lost at sea!” the Captain said thoughtfully; and it was evident that
from that moment he took a greater interest in the boy he had rescued.
“The old story, I suppose. No money; family at home; wife and children
left to starve.”

“Not quite as bad as that, sir,” Kit answered, “but very nearly. My
father left us a little house in Huntington, nearly all paid for, and
my mother earns some money by sewing. It is a hard pull; but if I can
find something to do, it will make things a little easier.”

“Well, Mr. Kit Silburn, of Huntington,” the Captain said, after another
long look at him, “you tell a very straight story. I thought out in the
street that you looked like an honest boy; that’s the reason I got you
away from the policeman. But I don’t judge boys by their faces; some of
the best faces are owned by the biggest rogues. I have a sure way of
my own of finding out whether a boy is likely to steal my spoons and
cushions. I judge a bank by what it has in its safes, and a boy by what
he has in his pockets. Empty out your pockets here on the table, till I
see what you carry.”

Kit was a little surprised at this request, which was delivered more
like an order on deck; but he obeyed promptly. He began with the
trousers pocket on the right-hand side, and laid out an old knife, a
key-ring without any keys on it, and a small foot rule. Then from the
left-hand pocket he took a well-worn pocket-book.

“What’s in the purse?” the Captain asked.

Instead of replying in words, Kit opened it and held it upside down
over the table, and there rolled out a half-dollar, a bright quarter, a
five-cent piece, and two pennies.

“That your whole stock?” the Captain asked.

“Yes, sir, that is all the money I have left,” Kit answered. Then he
began on his vest. From the upper pocket on the left-hand side he took
a toothbrush, and a pocket comb fastened to the back of a small mirror.
In a lower pocket, on one side, he had four collar buttons; and on
the other side a card with his name and home address written upon it,
prepared by his mother, as he explained, in case anything should happen
to him.

Then he began to empty the pockets of his coat. From the breast pocket
he took his handkerchief, and two clean handkerchiefs, folded, that
were beneath it.

From one of the lower pockets he took a morning newspaper, with
several of the advertisements marked with pencil. Then he put his hand
up to the inside breast pocket, but paused.

“Well, go on,” said the Captain.

With a little hesitation Kit took from the pocket two clean collars,
folded in the middle, and laid them on the table. Then a little
pocket testament with gilt edges. Then a letter that had been opened,
addressed to “Mr. Christopher Silburn, General Post Office, New York.”

“That’s all, sir,” he said.

“Where do you carry your matches?” the Captain asked.

“I don’t carry any matches, sir,” Kit answered.

“Nor cigarettes?”

“No, sir, I never smoke.”

The Captain picked up the testament and opened it at the fly-leaf
and read, written in a neat womanly hand, “Christopher Silburn, from
Mother. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.’”

“Now, my boy,” the Captain continued, “I see you have a letter there.
Letters always tell their own story. If you want to tell me more about
yourself, you can read that letter to me. But you need not do it unless
you choose.”

“I am quite willing to read it, sir,” Kit replied, taking up the
letter. “It is from my sister, with a few lines added by my mother.”

He took it from the envelope and stepped up closer to the light. The
body of the letter was in a scrawly, girlish hand, and the postscript
was written evidently by the same hand that wrote the inscription in
the testament.

  MY DEAR KIT [he read]: We are so worried about you for
  fear something will happen to you in that big city. Mamma says it
  is more than fifty times as big as Bridgeport, and I am always a
  little afraid when I go there. I cried half the night last night,
  and I know Mamma was crying for you in the evening, though she
  didn’t think that I saw her. Dear old Turk was so quiet all day, I
  know he missed you, too.

  I do hope you will find some situation you like, and get a good
  start. But if you don’t find one, we want you to come home, Kit;
  Mamma says so.

  I bought stamps with one of my dollars to-day and send them to
  you in this, for fear you may run out of money. If you don’t get
  anything to do, send me a postal card, and I will send you the
  other one too, so you can come home in the boat. I do wish you were
  here this evening.
                         Your loving sister,
                                            GENEVIEVE.

Then he read the postscript:--

  MY DARLING BOY: Sister has written for me, as my eyes ache
  in the evening. We hope to hear from you by to-morrow. Be sure we
  both miss you very much. God bless you, my boy, and take care of
  you. Remember what I told you before you started.
                                               MOTHER.

“And you have spent your sister’s stamps, I suppose?” the Captain
asked, when Kit, having finished, refolded the letter.

“No, sir, I was robbed of them,” he replied. “I took them into a
little shop in one of the avenues to have them changed into money,
and the man put them in the drawer, but would not pay me for them.
He accused me of stealing them. ‘You’re not the first office boy has
stolen his boss’s stamps and come here to sell them,’ he said. ‘Go and
bring your boss, till I give him back his stamps.’”

“And being a country boy, you did not think of taking the address of
the shop, I suppose?” the Captain asked.

“No, sir,” Kit answered. “He threatened to call a policeman if I didn’t
go away, so I went.”

“Looks as if the shopkeeper was the thief himself,” said the Captain,
smiling at Kit’s innocence. “Well, put your things back in your
pockets. How old are you?”

“Sixteen, sir,” Kit answered; “nearly seventeen.”

“Ever been to sea?”

“No, sir. I know very little about the water, for a sailor’s boy.
Huntington is ten miles back from the Sound, and a good many of the
people there are seafaring men, but the boys don’t see much of salt
water.”

“Would you like to go to sea?” the Captain asked, looking up at him
suddenly.

“Yes, sir; I should like it very much indeed,” Kit answered promptly.

“Well, I haven’t taken all this trouble with you just for amusement,”
the Captain went on. “I am in need of a cabin boy; and when I saw you
in the hands of the policeman I rather thought that fate had sent me
one without farther trouble. I never take a boy who has run away from
home, and for that reason I wanted to find out about you by what you
had in your pockets. And I find that you have not run away, and that
you have very good references. A boy with a Bible in his pocket and a
letter from his mother and sister has as good references as I want. I’m
not very much of a church man myself; know more about log books than
prayer books, maybe; but I like to see a boy who’s started out right.
Would you like to be my cabin boy?”

“Yes, sir; I should like very much to have the place,” Kit replied.

“Then I’ll tell you what the place is, so you’ll know what you’re
about,” the Captain continued. “You know what a tramp steamer is, I
suppose?”

“Yes, sir,” Kit answered. “It is a steamer that belongs to no regular
line, but goes wherever she can get freight to carry.”

“That’s it,” the Captain assented. “And the _North Cape_ is a
tramp steamer. She belongs to no regular line, but goes wherever she
can get freight to carry. She is chartered for one more voyage to Sisal
after hemp, and after that she will go wherever business offers. It may
be on one side of the world and it may be on the other. So if you go
with me, you are just as likely to be in China six months from now, as
to be in New York.”

Such a prospect made Kit’s eyes sparkle.

“I should like that very much, sir,” he answered.

“Very well, then,” the Captain resumed. “Your pay will be six dollars
a month, and you are not to go ashore without leave. That is not very
much pay, but on the ship you will get your board, so you will have
more money at the end of the month than you would have with more pay on
shore. Your work will be to do whatever you’re told, and you’ll have
to walk a very straight line. Don’t think because I have talked to you
so much to-night that I’m going to pet you, for I’m not. When a ship
leaves port, there is only one law for everybody on board, and that is
the captain’s orders.”

He paused a moment, and then went on:--

“There is another boy on this ship, the engineers’ mess-room boy.
You’ve heard the old saying, I suppose, that one boy is half a boy and
two boys are no boy at all. But it’s not so on the _North Cape_.
Each boy has to be a whole boy here, from the top of his head to the
soles of his boots. I don’t allow any skylarking, or any quarrelling.”

Kit saw that he was expected to make some reply, so he said, “I will
try to please you, sir.”

“I think you will,” said the Captain. “Now you have a start,--not a
very big one, but as good as most boys have,--and the rest lies with
yourself. You can push your way up in the world, or you can make a fool
of yourself and go to the dogs. Nobody but yourself can say which it
shall be.”

“I am very much obliged to you, sir,” Kit answered. “I found it pretty
hard to get the start, but now that I have it I shall try to make the
most of it.”

“It’s time to turn in,” said the Captain, glancing at the cabin clock
and seeing that it was almost midnight. “To-morrow you must write home
for whatever clothes you have. No matter what they are, they will
be good enough when we are at sea. And you must ask your mother’s
permission to go; I won’t take you without that, but as soon as you
get it, I will let you sign the crew list; and you can begin your work
to-morrow morning, while you’re waiting for it. We’ll not be away from
here for a week yet, and there’s plenty of time. You can sleep on one
of the cabin sofas to-night.”

With that the Captain turned the big lamp down low, picked up his
overcoat, and disappeared through a door at the end of the cabin,
leading, as Kit learned afterward, to his own stateroom.

Kit was a little dazed at first by the rapidity with which things were
happening. Late in the afternoon he had concluded to go without any
supper, because he was not very hungry and he could not afford to eat
just because it was meal time. Then he had looked about for a place to
sleep outdoors, having no idea how many thousand homeless people in
New York are doing that same thing every night, nor how vigilant the
police are to drive them away or arrest them. He had spent two nights
in cheap lodging-houses in the Bowery, but everything was so foul and
uncomfortable there that he preferred the open air. Then he had gone
to sleep between the hemp bales, only to be poked with a club and
shaken and put under arrest. And now here he was an hour later with as
good a situation as he had hoped to find; and a chance to sleep in as
snug and comfortable a cabin as he ever dreamed of; and a prospect of
breakfast in the morning that would not have to be paid for out of his
poor little eighty-two cents.

He went around the table to the longest of the three sofas in the
cabin, and found it covered with soft leather cushions. There was even
a leather pillow at the end. He lay down and tried to think things
over. He had no doubt that his mother would consent to his going, for
it had always been intended that he should go to sea with his father.
Then he thought about Genevieve and her stamps, and about Turk, and in
five minutes he was fishing in his dreams, in Bonnibrook, the stream
that runs through Huntington.

A noise in the cabin awoke him. It was the steward giving the place its
morning cleaning; and half asleep as he still was, Kit saw that the sun
was streaming through the port-holes.

“Hello, there,” said the steward, “where did you come from?”

Kit sat up and looked around. He had to think a moment before he could
tell where he did come from.

“I’m the new cabin boy, sir,” he said.

“Get up, then, and stir yourself,” said the steward.

CHAPTER II.

A VOYAGE TO YUCATAN.

For five days after Kit’s arrival on board the _North Cape_
the steam winches were at work ten hours a day with their deafening
clatter, first in hoisting the remainder of the hemp bales out of the
hold, then in taking in what shipping men call a “general cargo,”
consisting in part of barrels of flour, boxes of tea, cases of cloth,
hats, shoes, and other things necessary in a country where little but
hemp is produced.

On the fifth day there came indications that the ship was about to
sail. The last of the piles of merchandise on the wharf disappeared,
the winches stopped, and two of the hatches were battened down. Kit was
prepared for this, for he was now a legal member of the ship’s family,
having signed the crew list. He had written home and had received his
mother’s permission to go to sea, coupled with many loving expressions
and much good advice; and had received, too, an affectionate letter
from Genevieve, and a little bundle containing the clothing he had left
at home.

Early in the afternoon the Captain’s bell rang, and it was Kit’s
business to answer it.

“Go tell the chief I want steam at eight o’clock,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir,” Kit answered, and ran up to the chief engineer’s room to
deliver the order. When he left the chief’s room he was stopped near
the engine-room skylights by the boatswain.

“Here, youngster,” said he, “run up for’ard and ask the first officer
to send me the load-water-line; I’ve got to take soundings.”

“Yes, sir,” Kit answered again, and was about to start on the
errand when he was stopped by Tom Haines, the fourth engineer, a
pleasant-faced young Scotchman of about twenty, who was leaning against
the skylights.

“Don’t go, young ’un,” Haines said; “he’s trying to make a fool of you.
The load-water-line is painted on the side of the ship; besides, we
don’t take soundings lying at a wharf.”

Kit laughed good-naturedly at the joke, and Haines added:--

“They’ll soon get tired of playing tricks on you, as you don’t get mad.
Just keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, and you’ll soon know as
much about the ship as any of them.”

“Oh, I don’t intend to let them make me mad,” Kit answered, “no matter
how many tricks they play on me. A new boy has to expect that sort of
thing, I suppose.”

Before he reached the cabin companionway he was stopped by “Chocolate”
Cheevers, the engineer’s mess-room boy, whose nickname was generally
abbreviated to “Chock.” This boy had already played more tricks upon
Kit than all the rest of the crew combined, and the new cabin boy
felt sure that he would not be a pleasant companion on the voyage.
The curious nickname that the sailors had given him came, it was easy
to see, from the brown hue of his skin; and this and his tight-curled
black hair and velvety brown eyes marked him for a light West Indian
mulatto. He was about a year older than Kit, tall and slender.

“Say, farmer,” he said, laying a hand on Kit’s shoulder (disliking his
own nickname, he was anxious to attach one to Kit), “don’t you want to
go ashore with me and have a look at the town to-night? This will be
our last night in port.”

“Why, we’re going to sail at eight o’clock,” Kit answered.

“Well, you are a green one!” Chock laughed. “How can we sail before we
get our crew on board? We’ll not leave the wharf before midnight, and
then she’ll anchor out in the harbor till morning.”

“But I can’t go on shore without leave,” Kit protested, “nor you
either.”

“We can get leave fast enough, on the last night. Come along, and we’ll
take in some of the shows on the Bowery. It’s a gay old place, that
Bowery.”

“Oh, that’s what you mean by taking a look at the town, is it?” Kit
laughed. “I don’t care about that kind of a look, thank you. I saw a
little of the Bowery when I was looking for a job, and I’m not fond of
it; and I have no money to throw away on such things. We’d better both
stay on board and attend to our business.”

“Ah, the cabin boy is a preacher as well as a farmer, is he?” Chock
sneered. “Service of song every Sunday morning.”

“No, I am no preacher,” Kit answered pleasantly; “but I am not fool
enough to spend my money on Bowery shows, either.”

The Captain’s bell rang again, and he had to hurry away before Chock
had a chance to retort. He was wanted this time to help the Captain
get ready to go ashore; and after the Captain had gone he took the
opportunity to write his last letter home before sailing, as he always
had less to do when the Captain was away. There were writing-materials
on the big cabin table, and he sat down and wrote:--

  DEAR MOTHER AND VIEVE:--We are getting up steam and will
  be off to-night or to-morrow morning, so this is the last letter
  you will get from me till I am back from Yucatan. And won’t I be a
  regular old sailor by that time!

  The Captain has gone ashore, and we expect the rest of the crew
  this evening. You see only about half the crew stay by the ship
  all the time; the rest are shipped new for every voyage. The
  regular ones are the Captain, the first and second mates, the
  chief engineer and his three assistants, the boatswain, the cabin
  steward, cabin boy (that’s the undersigned!), cook, galley boy
  (that boy is about thirty!), and the engineers’ mess-room boy.
  Then before sailing we ship six men “before the mast,” and four
  firemen, or stokers. That will make twenty-three of us on board
  when we sail.

  I think I have given the Captain satisfaction so far, and I like
  it first-rate. Of course we are only in port yet, but I shall like
  it at sea too. We have a beautiful little cabin, and the Captain’s
  room is about half as large as the cabin. I have to take care of
  his room, keep it clean, and keep his clothes in order; clean the
  cabin every morning, fill and polish the big lamp, run when the
  Captain’s bell rings, and, as he says, “do whatever I’m told,”
  which of course I do.

  At the other end of the cabin, across a little alley, are three
  good staterooms. The first and second mates have one together, and
  the cabin steward and I have another. He sleeps in the lower berth,
  and I in the upper. It makes fine quarters for us; but we would
  have to move out if there were passengers on board.

  At meal times the Captain and first mate eat together first, then
  the second mate comes down and eats, and after he is done the
  steward and I eat together. The engineers have their own mess-room.
  Of course there is plenty to eat, and our china is all marked N.
  C., for _North Cape_. You wouldn’t think things would be
  so grand on a freight ship. Why, the cabin is all furnished in
  mahogany, with soft leather cushions. Oh, I forgot to say that I
  have to help the steward wash the dishes, so it’s well you taught
  me how.

  Don’t think I am off on a pleasure trip. I didn’t leave you
  both for that. I have lots of work to do; and I hope to do it
  faithfully, so that before long I may be something better than a
  cabin boy. But cabin boy isn’t so bad for just now.

  The _North Cape_’s size is 2850 tons, and she is a very strong
  iron ship; so you need not be worried about me. Shake dear old
  Turk’s paw good-by for me. You know how much love I send to you
  both. Good-by for a month or six weeks.
                                       Your loving
                                                  KIT.

That was the longest letter he had ever written; and by the time it was
finished he had to help set the supper table, for the ship’s meals must
go on whether the Captain was on board or not. Then the dishes were
hardly washed and put away after supper before the Captain returned,
to be followed in a few minutes by a shipping agent who brought the
crew--the six sailors and four stokers, most of whom had been supplied
with enough liquor to make them willing to sign orders for advances on
their pay, for the benefit of the agent and boarding-house keeper. Some
of them were quite sober, however, and there was one young man of good
appearance whom Kit thought he should like.

It was nine o’clock by the time the sailors were aboard and quartered
down in the forecastle, but still there were no further signs of the
ship’s moving; on the contrary, the Captain went ashore again, and the
usual harbor lights were kept burning in the rigging. About eleven
o’clock, having nothing to do, but feeling too much excited over the
start to turn in, Kit went up on deck, and was glad to find Tom Haines
taking the air while he waited for his watch to begin at midnight.

“I wonder why we don’t get off, sir,” Kit said, going up to the young
engineer.

“You mustn’t say ‘sir’ to me, young ’un,” Haines laughed. “It’s only
the Captain and the two mates and the chief engineer that you’re to say
‘sir’ to. But we’ll be off in a few minutes now.”

“Then we’ll be out at sea in two or three hours!” Kit exclaimed.

“Not a bit of it,” Haines answered. “We’d hardly go to sea without the
Captain, and he is spending the night on shore. We’ll drop down below
the Statue of Liberty and anchor there, and some time to-morrow we’ll
get off.”

“What delays us so long, when everything is ready?” Kit asked.

“Everything is not ready,” Haines replied. “We have to give the crew
a few hours to sober up in, for one thing; they are not fit for duty
now. It’s an outrageous shame the way the sailors are brought on board
drunk; but that’s always the way, so I suppose there’s no use worrying
about it. Then we can’t go till the charterers of the ship tell us to;
the minute they say go, we’re off. You may as well turn in, young ’un,
for you’ll not see her fairly under way much before noon to-morrow.”

Kit went down to the cabin and did such odd jobs as he could find, for
he knew it was useless for him to try to sleep when the ship was about
to move. When everything was straightened up, he sat down by the big
table under the lamp and took out the little book in which his mother
had written his name.

“I wish they’d had steamships in these Bible times,” he said to
himself; “I’d like to see what they had to say about them. There’s a
good deal here about ships, but they were all such little ones; and I
don’t see anything about cabin boys; maybe they didn’t have any cabins.”

He had not been reading long before the blowing of the big whistle
and the noise on deck told him that the ship was about to move, and
he hurried out. But that first little stage of the journey was a
disappointment. She merely crawled over to the Statue of Liberty and
dropped her anchor, and there was nothing to be seen but the great
blazing torch over the statue, and the twinkling lights on shore.

It was hardly daylight in the morning when Kit felt himself roughly
shaken, and heard the voice of the steward saying:--

“Come, hustle out here, boy. We’re away from the wharf now, and you’ve
got to stir yourself. Don’t lie there and say ‘yes, sir,’ but jump.
I’ll have no lazy boys about my cabin.”

Kit sprang up and dressed as fast as he could, but nothing he did
satisfied the steward, who ordered him here and there apparently for
the sake of showing his authority, scolded him, and once took him by
the shoulders and shook him.

“I’d rather hate to sail with the steward for captain!” Kit said to
himself, laughing inwardly at the little man’s feeble attempt at
violence. He did not even know the man’s name, for he was always
addressed as “steward”; but he was a middle-aged, dried-up little
fellow, his yellowish face marked from small-pox, and his body so
thin that his coat always hung like a bag. He spoke with a strong
foreign accent, and Kit had noticed already that the Captain did not
seem to like to have him about him; but he was a capital steward, and
understood his business from top to bottom.

“I ought to have brought a note-book along to keep a list of the things
I learn,” Kit said to himself after several hours of this nagging;
“I’ve learned a fresh thing this morning, anyhow--not to make a show
of myself by giving unnecessary orders if I’m ever put in any little
position of authority.”

How differently the Captain managed things! About ten o’clock a little
tug came alongside, and the Captain and the pilot climbed aboard.

“Put her under way, Mr. Mason,” he said to the first mate as he passed
him, as quietly as if he had been saying “It’s a fine day.” The steward
would have made more fuss over having the carving-knife cleaned.

It was a grand thing to be steaming out to sea in a fine ship like the
_North Cape_; but now that the moment had come Kit felt a little
more serious over it than he expected. He had never been away from home
before, and a thousand recollections of the old place crowded into
his mind. What were his mother and Vieve doing, and how long would it
be before he should see them again? Having little to do in the middle
of the morning, he went up on deck and leaned over the rail while the
steamer ran down through the Narrows and into the lower bay. Everything
was new and beautiful to him; but he would have enjoyed it more if
there had not been, somehow, a little bit of a haze before his eyes.
Suddenly he felt a friendly clap on the back, and heard the kindly
voice of Tom Haines:--

“Brace up, young ’un. You might as well start your first voyage
laughing as crying.”

“Oh, I’m not crying,” Kit protested; and he proved it by wiping the
back of his hand across his eyes. “You’ll think I’m a big baby, won’t
you?”

“Not at all,” Haines answered; “I salted the ocean myself a little when
I first left home. You’ll soon get used to being away.”

“It’s not only that,” Kit said thoughtfully. “This is the first time
I’ve ever seen the big ocean, and I can’t help thinking that my father
is lying at the bottom of it somewhere. He was lost at sea about a year
ago.”

“All the more reason for you to keep up a bold front, young ’un,”
Haines insisted. “If you have no father, you have to shift for
yourself, and for your family too, like enough. Keep at work and don’t
stop to think about such things. If you want to send a line home to let
them know you’re all right, you can send it ashore by the pilot, you
know, when we’re outside the Hook.”

Captain Griffith was not the man to leave his ship in the hands of the
pilot, as some captains do. He was up on the bridge, glass in hand, and
remained there till he had seen the flags run up that announced to the
signal station at Sandy Hook, “_North Cape_, for Sisal,” so that
her departure would be announced to the owners and all interested. Then
he went below, and the chief mate took his place on the bridge.

Kit was surprised, perhaps almost disappointed, to find that the sea
was as smooth as the bay. It was one of those days that come sometimes
even in winter, when there is hardly a ripple on the surface. There was
not a sign of the seasickness he expected, and while the Captain was on
the bridge he had an opportunity to write another “last line” home.

“Dear Mother,” he wrote with pencil, “I can write you another line to
send by the pilot. We are at sea now, just outside Sandy Hook, and it
is as smooth as Bonnibrook. I am not the least seasick. A little bit
homesick, but I’ll soon work that off. I have to help set the dinner
table now. Love to all. Kit.”

In another half-hour the pilot was gone, and they were fairly cut off
from the world till they reached the coast of Yucatan. The Atlantic
Highlands loomed up, and Seabright, and Long Branch, and so many more
places on the New Jersey coast, that it looked to Kit as if it must be
one continuous town. When darkness came they could still see the lights
on shore.

An hour after supper the Captain went into his stateroom, sat down at
his desk that had a bookcase over the top, and called Kit. He had a
bundle of very large sheets closely written in columns before him, and
more sheets of the same paper, blank.

“Can you read writing, my boy?” he asked. “Oh, yes, I know you can,”
he added, “for you read a letter to me. See whether you can read this
writing to me while I copy it,” and he handed Kit one of the big sheets.

Kit took it and began with the first line across the broad page:--

“‘Hernandez & Co., Merida,’” he read; “‘1 case dry goods; weight 168
pounds;’ then here’s some sort of a mark--a square with an ~H~
inside of it.”

“That’s what we call a diamond ~H~,” the Captain explained; “when
it’s in a circle, we call it a circle ~H~. Now go on.”

Kit read several more of the lines without difficulty, till the Captain
stopped him.

“You’ve been to school, then, have you?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, sir!” Kit answered. “I always went to school till about six
months ago. Since then I’ve been doing whatever work I could get.”

“Study geography?” the Captain asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you know about the place we’re going to--Sisal?”

“It is a small place on the coast of Yucatan, sir,” Kit answered
promptly; “a seaport for the city of Merida, which lies about twenty
miles inland. But I have learned most of that from your books here
since I came aboard, sir,” he added, blushing a little.

“Well, I am glad to see you are honest about it,” the Captain said,
with a smile. “I think you can stand there and read some of these
manifests to me while I copy them. These things are the plague of my
life. I have to make three copies of them before we reach Sisal, and
I’d rather navigate a ship around the world than do it. Go ahead, now,
and be very careful; for the least mistake will make no end of trouble.”

Kit began and read line by line with great care, while the Captain
laboriously copied. After fifteen or twenty minutes of the work the
Captain laid down the pen, and began to open and shut his hand and to
rub it.

“Ah, my fingers are not as nimble as they once were,” he said. “It
gives me cramp in the hand.”

For some time Kit had been revolving something in his mind while he
read, but could not quite determine to speak it out. This pause of the
Captain’s, however, decided him.

“I write a plain hand, sir,” he said; “if you could trust me, I think I
could copy them for you.”

The Captain looked up at him with one of the piercing looks that seemed
to go through him, and Kit was a little alarmed. Maybe it was presuming
too much for the cabin boy to suggest such a thing. Even then, though,
under that sharp gaze he thought it was worth the venture, for if he
succeeded, it would show that he was good for something better than
scouring the knives.

“Sit down here and let me see your handwriting,” the Captain said at
length, laying a bit of plain paper on top of the manifests.

Kit sat down and took up the pen, and had just begun to write when
something happened that gave him so much satisfaction that he could
hardly keep a straight face. There came a knock at the door, and the
engineers’ mess-room boy stepped in with the engineer’s report of the
number of tons of coal in the bunkers. For this boy to see him seated
in the Captain’s stateroom, writing at the Captain’s desk, with the
Captain himself standing by watching him, was the best answer he could
give to the assertion that he was a “farmer” and a “preacher.” Chock
Cheevers could not have looked more astonished if he had seen one of
the stokers on the bridge taking an observation.

The little interruption over, Kit wrote, as neatly and plainly as he
could, “Christopher Silburn, cabin boy, steamship _North Cape_,
for Sisal.”

“Yes, that is a good plain hand,” the Captain said, taking the paper.
“I will let you try it, at any rate. You can go ahead while I go up on
the bridge. Remember that you can’t be too careful.”

He hooked the stateroom door open as he went out; and he had hardly
been gone five minutes before Mr. Hanway, the big, powerful second
mate, went down to his room for a reefing jacket. Seeing the new boy at
the Captain’s desk, and being fond of a little quiet fun, he went up to
the open door, touched his cap in mock politeness, and said,

“She’s heading sou-sou-west, sir.”

Kit hardly knew whether he dared joke with the second mate or not; but
with an inspiration he looked up from his work without the least change
of countenance, and, returning the salute, replied,

“Very good, sir; keep her so, sir.”

More than an hour passed before the Captain returned from the bridge,
and in the interval Kit nearly filled one of the large sheets.

“That will do for to-night,” the Captain said, looking over the page.
“You have done it very well; but there’s more than one night; you can
do a little at it every evening.”

Then the steward had something to say when Kit went into the pantry,
which also opened from the cabin. The steward was not pleased to see
the new boy taken into the Captain’s favor.

“I want that cabin cleaned before six o’clock in the morning,” he
growled. “You needn’t think you’re going to shirk your work because you
write for the Captain.”

“Very well, sir,” Kit answered. “I don’t intend to shirk any work.”

It did not seem quite right, on his first voyage, that the sea should
be so smooth all the way down the coast. Even when the _North
Cape_ passed Hatteras there was no more than a little swell. When
she reached the Florida coast, in about four days, she kept so well in
shore that the sandy beach could be seen plainly, and the palm trees
just as he had seen them in pictures. He learned from Tom Haines that
steamers bound for the Gulf always run as close to the Florida coast
as they dare, to be inside of the Gulf Stream, which flows northward at
the rate of about four miles an hour, and retards a south-bound steamer
just that much when she runs against it.

On the seventh day they sighted the eastern cliffs of Yucatan; and
after two days of steaming along the coast, but so far out that they
could see nothing but the outlines of the low hills, Kit learned that
they were approaching Sisal. By that time he had made three copies of
the long manifest, working at it a little nearly every evening on the
cabin table.

It was early in a hot afternoon that they dropped anchor off Sisal;
and nowhere in the world is it more appropriate to say of a ship that
she lies “off” a port, for at Sisal a ship of any size must lie at
least three miles off. There is no harbor, and the shore slopes off so
gradually that no ship can approach the town.

“That must have been as smooth a voyage as ever a ship made,” Kit said
to Tom Haines, as they stood by the rail together when the anchor went
down. “I didn’t know it ever was so smooth for ten days at a time.”

“The Atlantic is a treacherous old pond,” Tom answered. “To-day it
makes you believe it’s only a big lake; to-morrow it knocks you all to
pieces. And this is a bad part of the coast we’re on, this south side
of the Gulf; when we get any bad weather here, we have to hoist anchor
and run to sea. But you want to keep your eyes open now; you’ll see
some queer people in a few minutes.”

“What are all those little boats coming out to us?” Kit asked;
“lighters to take off the cargo?”

“No indeed!” Tom laughed. “They don’t begin work as fast as that here.
Everything is ‘mañana’ here, which means ‘to-morrow’ in Spanish; these
people all speak Spanish, you know. That first boat, the one with the
flag at the stern and rowed by four men, is the government boat, that
brings out the Captain of the port, the health officer, and a lot of
custom-house men. After they have examined our papers and found that
we’re all well, the other boats will come up. They are what we call
‘bum-boats,’ with things to sell--cigars and tobacco, bead work, canes
plated with tortoise-shell, all sorts of nonsense; and they will be
on the lookout for passengers who may want to go ashore. But it’s the
officers in the first boat I want you to see; they’ll be aboard in a
minute.”

The gangway had been lowered, and after a great deal of shouting in
Spanish the government boat came up to it and made fast. Then there
came up the steps a dozen swarthy men whose appearance gave Kit more
surprise than anything else he had seen on the voyage. Each one, as
far as he could see, wore nothing but a white shirt and a high black
silk hat, with a belt around the waist with a big revolver stuck in
each side. They carried themselves with great dignity, which made their
costume all the more grotesque; and as they stood on deck shaking
hands with Captain Griffith, it was as much as Kit could do to restrain
his laughter.

“Don’t they wear trousers in this country?” he whispered to Tom.

“They all have trousers on--white linen ones,” Tom answered; “but they
roll them clear up so they won’t get wet in the boat. And it’s the
fashion in Yucatan to wear the end of the shirt outside instead of
inside the trousers. It wouldn’t be so bad in this hot climate, with
their bare feet and legs, if they didn’t wear the high black hats to
look stylish.”

The Captain took his visitors down into the cabin; and next minute his
bell rang, and Kit had to run.

CHAPTER III.

A NORTHER ON THE GULF.

When the port officers returned to shore they left behind four of the
custom-house men, who were to stay on board the _North Cape_ as
long as she lay there; and these men deposited their high hats in the
cabin and put on dark blue caps that they carried in their pockets,
rolled down their trousers, and thus, though still in their bare feet,
transformed themselves into respectable-looking citizens.

Kit heard the order given from the bridge, “Lower away the captain’s
gig!” and in a few minutes Captain Griffith followed the officers
ashore to arrange for lighters to land his cargo. He returned in time
for supper, bringing along a package of letters that had been handed
him at the custom-house--some for himself, and some for members of the
crew.

“I think I have something here for you, Christopher,” he said as he
passed through the cabin, where Kit was setting the table. “Yes,”
he went on, pausing under the lamp to look over the letters, “‘Mr.
Christopher Silburn, S. S. _North Cape_, Sisal, Yucatan.’ There’s
news from home for you. The mail steamer left three days behind us, but
she has beaten us down and gone on to Vera Cruz; so you will have a
chance to answer your letter when she comes back, in about a week.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kit answered, as the Captain handed him a letter
addressed in his mother’s familiar handwriting. He was delighted to
hear from home, but still the letter frightened him a little, for he
had not expected to hear while he was away, and his first thought was
that there must be something the matter. He hastily cut the envelope
open and read far enough to see that no one was sick, then put the
letter in his pocket till his work was done. It was not till the supper
dishes were washed and put away that he had any leisure, and then he
sat down under the cabin lamp and read it. The main letter was from his
mother, and there was a shorter one from Genevieve.

  MY DEAR BOY [his mother wrote]: Though I have no news to tell you,
  I want to send you a few lines by the first mail steamer, for I
  don’t want you to feel that you are entirely cut off from home and
  family. No matter how far away you are, you know we are always
  thinking about you.

  And I don’t want to tire you with a lot of advice, but I do hope,
  my dear boy, that you will take care of yourself in every way. It
  may be selfish in me to say so, but I want you to remember that you
  have not only yourself, but your mother and sister too, to think
  about and work for. You are all we have. I am sure you will do your
  best wherever you are, but I want you to take great care of your
  health. That is an unhealthy country you are in, and you must not
  expose yourself to the hot sun. I will try to have some new shirts
  ready for you when you get back to New York; and I think you had
  better buy a few handkerchiefs, for you have not enough. And don’t
  forget the little book I gave you, Kit.
                                   YOUR LOVING MOTHER.

Then he unfolded the note from Genevieve.

  DEAR KIT [she wrote]: This is the first note I ever wrote without
  mother’s seeing it, but I do not want her to see this, because I am
  going to write to you about father, and that always troubles her.

  I want you always, when you are travelling about the world, to keep
  your ears open for news of the _Flower City_ or some of her
  boats. It may be foolish, but I never can believe that we shall not
  see him any more. You know how many people have been shipwrecked
  and then come home again years afterwards. You’ll do this, won’t
  you?

  Dear old Turk is trying to write to you. He heard me say that I was
  going to write, so he sits here beside me, putting up first one paw
  and then the other. I am sure he would write if he could. With love,
                                                VIEVE.

He was about to read the letters over again, when the Captain’s bell
rang. All the doors and port-holes were left open now, for the heat was
intense even after dark, and he went into the Captain’s room without
knocking.

“Shut the door, my boy,” the Captain said; “I have something to say to
you;” and as Kit obeyed, he could not help wondering whether he had
done anything that he was to be scolded for. But the Captain’s first
words relieved his mind.

“I am going to put you at a job to-morrow that will require all your
brains,” he said. “The lighters will be here in the morning after
cargo, and I am going to send you ashore to make a list of every
package landed. I have to keep a sharp eye on these boatmen, or they
rob me. Everything will be checked off as it leaves the ship, and you
will keep a list on shore, and the goods go into the hands of our agent
in Sisal immediately, and he receipts for them.

“Now I want you to understand,” he continued, “that this is very
important work. I have never trusted such work to a cabin boy before.
If you miss a package, it may cost me a great many dollars. But I see
you have some brains, and I want you to use them, and do the work
carefully.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kit answered. “I will certainly do my best.”

Kit returned to the cabin, with a little flush on his face. He had seen
for some days that his position on the ship was much better than when
he started, but he had not dreamed of such an important commission as
this. It would give him a great amount of extra work to do, but what
of that? He was not afraid of work. Nearly any one in the crew would
jump at the chance to go ashore and do what he was to do. Copying the
manifests had given him extra work, but it had paid many times over by
giving the Captain a good opinion of him.

Immediately after breakfast next morning the gig was lowered again,
and the Captain was rowed ashore by two of the men, with Kit sitting in
the stern by his side. Kit knew how some of the crew were wondering to
see him going off in this style, but he had no chance to speak to them.
On the way they passed three of the lighters going out--open boats
about thirty feet long, very strongly built, with a single mast, each
with a large crew of half-clad Mexicans ready for work.

The Captain waited till the first of the lighters arrived with its
load, and showed Kit where he was to stand on the mole, as the Mexicans
call the wharf, and how he was to keep his list. Then he returned to
the ship, and the cabin boy was left to his own resources.

“I’m going to be roasted and broiled and frizzled here,” he said to
himself, “under this sun. But I can stand it if these fellows can. And
when there’s no lighter in sight I can get into the shade there beside
the warehouse.”

He soon found that he was to have company in the hot sun; for as the
agent had to receipt for the goods, he sent one of his own clerks
to check them off on one of the manifests that Kit had copied. The
clerk was a slender young man in a broad-brimmed Panama hat; and Kit
was greatly amused when he touched his hat to him, and called him
“Señor.” But the young man spoke a little English, and they soon became
acquainted.

“You are young for a supercargo, Señor,” the clerk said, in a lull in
the work.

[Illustration: “‘YOU ARE YOUNG FOR A SUPERCARGO, SEÑOR.’”]

Kit had read enough sea stories to know something about supercargoes,
though he did not know that he was doing the work of one at that minute.

“I’m not the supercargo, sir,” he replied; “I’m the cabin boy; we have
no supercargo.”

“Ah!” said the clerk; and it was still more amusing to see how
dignified he immediately became, and what a superior air he assumed.
But another trifling incident soon made him friendly again, for the
agent himself came down to the mole to inquire about something, and he,
too, touched his hat to Kit and called him Señor, whereupon the clerk
said something in Spanish that must have explained that Kit was only
the cabin boy, for the agent immediately replied, “Oh, cabin boy is he?
Well, he must be a good one, or he wouldn’t be put at this work. Bring
him up to the house to breakfast.”

Kit was under the impression that he had had his breakfast several
hours before, on board ship; but he followed Tom Haines’s advice to
“keep his eyes open and his mouth shut,” and before long he learned
that the southern custom is to take only a cup of coffee and a roll
in the early morning, and to wait till midday for the full breakfast,
which is really an early dinner.

About twelve o’clock there were no lighters in sight, for the boatmen
were eating their breakfast too, and the clerk took Kit through a
narrow street to a big one-story stone warehouse, the agent’s business
place, where, on a shady rear verandah, a long table was spread.
This was “the house” the agent had referred to; and by keeping both
eyes and ears open, Kit learned that it is the custom in Yucatan for
the proprietors and all the employees of large business houses to
eat together in the warehouses, a cook and waiters being kept on the
premises.

He was a little embarrassed to find that he was to be seated at the
right hand of Mr. Ysnard, the agent, near the head of the table; for he
was bright enough to see that the seats were arranged according to rank
in the firm, with the proprietor at the top of the table, the cashier
and chief clerks next, then the minor clerks, and the porters and boys
near the foot.

“Hadn’t I better go lower down, sir?” he asked. “I don’t think I belong
up here.”

“Oh, yes, you do!” Mr. Ysnard laughed; “you are my guest to-day, and my
guests always belong in the seat of honor.”

While the many courses were brought on, soup, fish, roasts, dessert,
and fruits, Mr. Ysnard asked Kit enough questions to keep him busy
answering--how long he had been on the _North Cape_, how he liked
it, where he lived, and all about himself. But when, after the meal was
finished, they all sat talking, and most of them smoking, he began to
grow uneasy.

“I shall have to ask you to excuse me, sir,” he said to Mr. Ysnard. “I
am afraid some of the lighters will be coming in, and I must not miss
anything.”

“Very true, my boy, you must attend to business,” Mr. Ysnard answered.
“And you can safely follow the example, Michel,” he called down the
table to Kit’s fellow-clerk on the wharf, who sat about the middle.

Together they returned to their work, and up to dark they had little
chance for conversation, for eight lighters were now busy bringing
cargo. When it was too dark to see longer, the gig was sent to take Kit
on board.

“Make way for the supercargo!” Chock Cheevers cried, as he stepped on
board. “Clear a gangway there. Don’t you see who’s come aboard?”

But the second mate had something more important to say.

“Bring your list into the chart-room,” he ordered, “and compare it with
my tally.” The second mate had been keeping the tally of everything
that left the ship; and when the comparison was made they corresponded
exactly, showing that on his first day, at any rate, Kit had made no
mistakes.

It seemed a little odd to go to washing dishes again after being a
clerk all day; but they were soon done, and next morning he was out
bright and early to clean the cabin and set the table. After breakfast
he was rowed ashore as before, but dressed this time in his thinnest
clothes. Even at eight o’clock the sun was burning hot, and the
cloudless sky seemed to indicate an intensely hot day. He was soon
to learn, however, that tropical skies change very rapidly. Five or
six of the lighters had come in with loads and returned to the ship,
when there came a single puff of wind from off the water that reminded
Kit of home. It was the first really cool thing he had felt since his
arrival in Yucatan; and this little puff, lasting only a few seconds,
was more than cool--it was actually chilly.

“Ah, that’s good!” he said to the clerk; “I wish they’d give us more of
that.”

The clerk shivered in his linen clothes, and pointed with one hand
toward the sky. There far in the north was a big dark-gray cloud, that
seemed to grow larger and darker as they looked at it.

“El Norte!” Michel exclaimed; and shivered again.

“What’s that?” Kit asked.

“A norther, you call it in English,” the clerk replied; “a great cold
storm from the north. That puts an end to our work for some days.
There’ll be a heavy sea on in a few minutes.”

“Then I ought to get back to the ship,” Kit said half to himself.

“You couldn’t do it,” said the clerk. “Look.”

He pointed seaward, and Kit saw all the lighters scudding toward shore
before a wind that they hardly felt yet on the mole. Thick black smoke
was pouring from the _North Cape’s_ funnel, and across the water
he heard the “click, click, click,” of the steam windlass.

“Why, she’s going off!” Kit cried; “she’s hoisting anchor!”

“Of course she is,” Michel laughed; “she’ll have to put to sea; she
can’t lie there in a norther, and you’ll see no more of her till the
storm is over. That often happens here.”

“And what becomes of a cabin boy who happens to be left on shore?” Kit
asked, half inclined to laugh at the predicament he was in.

“You’re better off here than on the ship,” Michel answered, “and we
won’t let you starve.”

By this time the whole sky was overcast, and frequent blasts of the
cold wind struck them. The foremost of the lighters arrived, and their
men worked like beavers to land what cargo they had. All about were
men on the beach drawing their boats far up on shore out of reach of
the heavy sea that they knew was coming. As fast as the lighters were
unloaded, they too were drawn up. It was as much too cold now as before
it had been too hot, but they had to stay on the mole till everything
was checked off.

“Now make a run for it to the warehouse!” It was the voice of Mr.
Ysnard, who had come down to see that all was left snug, and who
saw that both the youngsters were shivering. Already the spray was
beginning to fly over the mole, and in one glance seaward Kit saw that
the _North Cape_ was standing out into the Gulf. He was left alone
in Yucatan; but instead of waiting to worry over it, he took to his
heels and beat Michel to the warehouse by several yards.

There he hardly knew the place, it was so dark; for all the shutters on
the seaward side had been closed to keep out the wind, as there was no
glass in the windows. People were hurrying through the streets, and the
sky was growing blacker every minute.

“Now we’ll catch it, my boy,” Mr. Ysnard laughed, as he followed them
in, half soaked with spray. “Three days these things last, generally,
and then it takes two or three more for the sea to go down so that the
lighters can go out. So you are a prisoner in Mexico for five days at
least, and you will be my guest longer than you expected.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kit answered; “but I hope the ship will not be in any
danger.”

“Oh, no more than from any other storm. There is plenty of sea room,
and she will run out fifty or a hundred miles and keep her nose in the
wind. No, she will be all right.”

The breakfast table had to be set in the warehouse, as the verandah
was too much exposed to the wind; and Kit noticed that the norther
interfered with business and upset everything just about as much as an
earthquake would at home. The clerks really suffered from cold, though
Kit found it warm enough in the shelter of the building. The storm
increased every minute, and they soon began to hear the roar of the sea
breaking against the mole.

It was a relief to everybody when closing time came, five o’clock.
Mr. Ysnard’s open carriage arrived to carry him to his home in the
country, and he told Kit that he was to go along.

“But you must have something around you, in this wind,” he said; “I
think I can lend you a Mexican overcoat.” And he went into the office
and returned in a minute with two large red blankets, one for himself
and one for Kit.

“This is what we call a ‘serape,’”[1] he explained. “See, there is a
slit cut in the middle for the head to go through,” and he slipped the
blanket over Kit’s head and put his own on in the same way; and Kit
could not help laughing to see himself so suddenly transformed into a
young Mexican.

  [1] Pronounced ser-rap-pa.

As they were driven through the streets he saw that Sisal was a
desolate little place of few houses, some of them of stone plastered
over and some covered with corrugated iron; and the streets were nearly
deserted on account of the norther, and most of the shutters closed.
The few men to be seen were all wrapped in serapes, which warmed the
shoulders, but could not warm the bare feet, nor heads covered with
straw hats.

Mr. Ysnard’s house was on the brow of a low hill overlooking the town
and the sea, and after the late dinner he took Kit into his “den,” as
he called it, and they had a long talk before bedtime.

“As you copied the manifests,” the agent said in the course of the
conversation, “you are familiar with all the marks on the cargo. You
may see some cases coming ashore without any marks at all. Those are
little private ventures by some of the officers or crew; and when you
see one of them all you have to do is let it pass without putting it on
your list, you know. They escape paying duty by slipping them through
that way.”

“No, sir; I have no instructions of that kind,” Kit answered. “My
orders are to make a list of everything brought ashore.”

“But if there should be a little profit in it for you?” Mr. Ysnard
suggested. “Suppose you were paid a small commission on everything that
slipped through without your seeing it?”

“I don’t think you ought to ask it of me, Mr. Ysnard,” Kit replied.
“The Captain trusts me, and I should be ashamed to betray him. I
couldn’t possibly do it.”

“Ah, my boy, I was just trying you,” Mr. Ysnard laughed, giving Kit
a hearty clap on the shoulder. “I am glad to see that you are not to
be tempted. That is just what we want to avoid, the landing of such
smuggled cases, for they get both the ship and the agent into a lot of
trouble. I suppose the Captain sent you ashore because he was sure he
could trust you.

“There is always room for bright young fellows who can be trusted,”
he added; “in fact, I could make room in my own business for a young
American of about your age. How would you like to leave the ship and
make more money in Sisal?”

The question came so suddenly that it almost staggered Kit; but he soon
made up his mind how to answer.

“I think it is very pleasant here, sir,” he said, “but I don’t believe
in changing. I have a good start on the ship, and don’t think I ought
to leave it; but I am very much obliged to you, sir, for the offer.”

When he went out in the morning, he saw that the Gulf was almost white;
partly with foam, and partly from the white sand that was stirred up
from the bottom. Tremendous seas were breaking over the mole, and great
sheets of spray were flying over several of the warehouses.

The norther prophets were right in saying that the norther would last
for three days. Every night Kit went home with Mr. Ysnard, but without
meeting his wife, as she was an invalid and seldom left her room. On
the fourth day the dark clouds drifted gradually away, the wind lulled,
and the tropical sun shone hot again. About noon he was delighted to
see the _North Cape_ steam back to her old place and drop her
anchor.

“But you’ll not get out to her for a day or two yet,” Mr. Ysnard told
him; “no small boat could go out till this heavy sea subsides. I am
going into the country in a few minutes to see how much my plantations
have suffered, and if you like, you can go along and learn something
about this hemp you are going to be loaded with.”

The carriage came early that day, and they were soon driving between
broad fields of cactus plants.

“That’s the stuff,” Mr. Ysnard told him; “it is the leaves of this
cactus that yield the hemp. You see some of the leaves are six feet
long and four or five inches broad. We cut off the leaves and soak them
in water, then run them through a machine that extracts the fibre. That
fibre is the hemp. Another machine cleans and straightens it, and we
dry it and press it into bales, and it is ready to go north to be made
into ropes and matting. Now you know something about the cargo you are
to carry.

“But you have no idea,” he continued, “of the condition of the workmen
who raise this hemp. We call them peons, and on most of the plantations
they are little better than slaves, though I am glad to say that it
is not so on mine. In this country a peon cannot leave the land he
belongs on while he is in debt to his master; and as they earn only
about twelve and one-half cents a day they are always in debt. A son
is responsible also for his father’s debts, so they are practically
slaves, with no chance of ever freeing themselves. It is a terrible
system.”

“Your plants do not seem to have suffered much from the wind, sir,”
said Kit; “maybe it is because you treat your men better.”

“Well,” Mr. Ysnard laughed, “there is no great merit in that. They do
better work for me because I treat them well, and it pays better in the
end. Slave labor is always the poorest.”

The next day the lighters ventured out again, and there was more work
for Kit on the mole. Then when the cargo was all landed the loading
began, and he was kept on deck to keep tally of the number of bales
received. That took six full days, and still there was no sign of the
mail steamer returning.

“The storm must have delayed her,” Captain Griffith said. “No use
to send letters home now; for she has to touch at Havana, and we go
direct, and we’ll beat her up. We’ll be off to-morrow.”

Kit asked and received permission to go ashore to say good-by to the
agent who had been so hospitable to him. He had spent so much time in
the little town that it almost seemed like leaving home again. Mr.
Ysnard shook his hand warmly at parting.

“I have enjoyed having you here,” he said. “I like to see a bright,
faithful young chap like you. Our young Mexicans are slow coaches
beside you American boys. I was going to send you out a barrel of
Mexican fruit that I had put up for you, so I’ll have it put in your
boat. Keep pulling, my boy, and some day you may be down here in a
better position than cabin boy.”

Kit tried to think it over as he returned to the ship, but he could
not explain to himself what he had done to make Mr. Ysnard take such
an interest in him. There was something about him, he could not help
seeing, that pleased both the Captain and the agent; and he was glad of
it, though he did not know what it was.

When the ship passed the Sandy Hook signal station, eight days later,
the flags that she set told the brief story of the homeward voyage.

“_North Cape_,” they said, “eight days from Sisal, with hemp.
Smooth passage.”

And when a few hours afterwards she lay at her old place in front of
Martin’s Stores, her bow almost rubbed against the stern of a little
tug.

“Why, that’s the _Triton_!” Kit said to himself, when he saw the
tug’s name. “That’s Captain Judson’s boat, from Bridgeport, and Captain
Judson is our near neighbor in Huntington. If he is going back, maybe
he will take my barrel of fruit up to Bridgeport.”

“Yes, going back to-night,” Captain Judson said, when Kit found him. “I
towed a yacht down yesterday. Take up a barrel of fruit for you? Aye,
that I will, lad--and take you too, if you can get off. I know somebody
up there who’d be glad to see you. Eh, my boy?”

Take him too! That was something that Kit had not thought of; but what
a surprise it would be for the folks at home to see him come walking
in! Within five minutes he had seen Captain Griffith and had readily
been granted a week’s leave of absence.

CHAPTER IV.

KIT’S CONNECTICUT HOME.

The Huntington stage was the same old weather-beaten stage that Kit had
left a month before, but its wheels were gone. Fairfield County, all
the way from Bridgeport back to Huntington and beyond, was white with
snow, and the frozen roads were packed hard. The body of the stage had
been lifted from its wheels and put on runners, and the bells on its
two gaunt horses jingled merrily through the Bridgeport streets and
over the Connecticut hills.

“My folks all well, Silas?” was the first question that Kit asked when
he found the stage nearly ready to start.

“They was right peart when I come down this mornin’,” the driver
replied, “so I guess they hain’t gone into a decline since. Sakes
alive, but won’t they be surprised to see you, though! They was lookin’
for a letter. But what’s this, Kit? No overcoat! Here, wrap this hoss
blanket ’round you snug.”

“Oh, you don’t know how good the cold feels, Silas,” Kit laughed,
though he was glad enough to accept the blanket. “I’ve just come from a
country where the sun burns like a hot iron, and the trees were full
of fruit, ten days ago.”

Involuntarily he looked around to see that his barrel was safe.

“Now don’t you give yourself no consarn ’bout that thar bar’l!” the
driver exclaimed. “When Silas lashes a bar’l on behind his sleigh, you
can just make up your mind it’s thar to stay. While you youngsters
goes out an’ sees the world, old Silas he stays to hum an’ ’tends to
business, an’ carries your letters back to Hunt’n’ton.”

The only other passenger was Henry Steele, the Huntington shoemaker,
who had been down to Bridgeport to buy leather, and had it in a big
roll beside his feet; and he and the driver plied Kit with so many
questions about his travels that he was kept busy answering.

“What was you aboard this _North Cape_?” Silas asked.

Kit felt for a moment that considering the work he had been doing he
was entitled to lay claim to some higher position than the one he
really occupied; but he soon smothered that down.

“Cabin boy,” he answered; and added to himself, “There’s no use of a
fellow being ashamed of a good honest job, and one that he likes.”

“And you got good and seasick at the start, I’ll warrant!” Mr. Steele
laughed.

“No, sir, I wasn’t sick a single minute on the whole voyage,” Kit
answered.

“Well, Kit,” said the shoemaker, “if some boys were to tell me that,
I’d think they were drawing the long bow. But I’ve known you since you
were knee-high to a grasshopper, and I must say I’ve never known you to
speak anything but the truth.”

“Th-th-thank you!” Kit tried to say it with a laugh, but the laugh
turned into a shiver. It was all very well to feel at home in the
cold, but there were some holes in the horse blanket. And he was
growing impatient to see the familiar faces. He had not felt so down in
Yucatan, because there he knew it was impossible; but now that every
minute took him nearer, the minutes became dreadfully long.

Manly young sailor as he was, his heart beat faster as the stage
drew into the outskirts of Huntington--if so small a place can be
said to have outskirts. He had had already a glimpse of the white
church steeple from a distant hilltop. And now there was the church
itself! And he could have told with his eyes shut just how the land
lay opposite the church. First there was a little store, with some
empty barrels and boxes always in front. Then there was Dr. Thomas’s
big white house, with the white fence in front. And then came a small
house a story and a half high, with a light piazza across the front,
standing about thirty feet back from the street, with a weather-beaten
picket fence in front, and some big trees on each side extending their
thick limbs over its mossy roof. House and fence had once been brown,
but both were sadly in need of paint, and one end of the cornice was
coming loose. But in Kit’s eyes, that was the cosiest place of all; for
that was home!

There were no tracks in the deep snow between the road and the walk
in front of the house, and when Silas guided the horses in toward the
sidewalk they sank halfway to their knees. Then Kit unwrapped his
blanket and sprang out. Some one in the front room of the house saw
the stage stop, and that was a matter to be inquired into. All the
neighbors take an interest in it when the Huntington stage stops in
front of a house. The door opened, and a rosy-cheeked young girl of
about fourteen looked out.

“Hello, Vieve!” Kit cried, waving his hand to her. A tropical hurricane
could not have made his heart jump like that.

The girl paused long enough to cry out:--

“Mother! Mother! Quick! Here’s Kit!”

And the next moment she was down the walk, and the sailor boy was
smothered with hugs and kisses in a way that made old Silas and the
shoemaker feel quite young again, and Turk was barking a noisy welcome.
In another minute Mrs. Silburn joined them, and all the hugging was
repeated.

“Now don’t trouble yourself about the bar’l,” Silas insisted when Kit
at length made his way back to the stage. “’Taint no weight at all;”
and he took it by the rims and carried it to the piazza, then rolled it
into the house.

“I’ve brought you something better than the letter you was lookin’ for,
Mrs. Silburn,” he said, as he returned to the stage.

But Mrs. Silburn hardly heard. She had eyes only for Kit, ears only for
what he said.

“You’re not sick, Kit, that you’ve come home?” she asked, when the
three were in the sitting-room together. “No,” she added, “I need
hardly ask that; I never saw you look better. Why, you’re as brown as
an Indian.”

“Never was ‘weller’ in my life,” Kit answered as well as he could, for
his mother was holding fast to him while Vieve was trying to drag him
up to the stove to warm him. “A week’s leave of absence, that’s all,
while the ship discharges cargo.”

“Oh, a whole week!” Vieve cried, jumping around him in her glee.
“That’s the reason you’ve brought your baggage!” and she glanced toward
the barrel.

“Did he bring that in here?” Kit asked. “That won’t do. It came from a
hot place, but it must stay in the cool up here. Have you got a cool
room we can put it in?”

“I think you’ll find all the other side of the house cool enough,” Mrs.
Silburn laughed. “We don’t keep any fires across the hall now; it saves
both wood and trouble.”

Kit rolled the barrel across the hall into the cold parlor, and hurried
back to the stove. But he could not stay in one place long--not for
the first hour or two. He had to go to the windows to see how the
yard looked, and into the kitchen to look at the familiar pans hanging
against the wall, and upstairs to the little room with the sloping
ceiling where he had slept so many years. When he came down again,
Vieve was putting on her hat and coat.

“Say, avast there, now,” he cried; “you’ll have to take another tack.
(I suppose you’ll expect me to talk sea talk, now I’m a sailor.) I know
what you’re after, Vieve, and it won’t do. No going out to buy more
things for supper. I’m not the prodigal calf, you know--the prodigal
son, I mean. Whatever you were going to have for your own suppers is
just what I want.”

“Just put yourself in that chair, Mr. Silburn,” Vieve laughed, pointing
to her father’s armchair, that she had drawn up to the fire for him,
“and don’t begin to interfere so soon;” and she was gone before he
could stop her. And Mrs. Silburn brought her husband’s slippers, that
were carefully laid away, and would have untied Kit’s shoes if he had
let her.

“You’ve had a hard time of it, Kit,” she said, “and we must make you
comfortable at home.”

“Indeed, I’ve not, mother,” he answered; “you mustn’t spoil me on that
account. I’ve had a splendid time, and enjoyed every minute. I’ve made
some good friends, too, since I went away.”

“I’m sure you would do that, Kit,” she answered, her face full of
motherly pride. “And you’ve grown so, too!”

It was not long before supper was ready, for Vieve was both cook and
errand girl while her mother was busy sewing.

“You’ll not mind eating in the kitchen, Kit?” his mother asked. “We eat
there now, while we’re alone.”

“Mind it!” Kit exclaimed; “it’s just what I wanted to do. Oh, look
here, Vieve!” he went on, as he took his mother by the arm and led
her into the kitchen, “have you cooked all these things so quick?
Beefsteak, and fried potatoes, and ham and eggs, and coffee? Why, we
ought to have you for cook aboard ship.”

“Ah, you don’t know how good it all tastes!” he declared, when they
had set to work at the eatables. “We have good fare on the ship, first
rate; but it’s not like home. No such coffee as this, I tell you.
Coffee is always bad at sea, they say.”

“And do you have to eat out of a little mess pan, like the other
sailors?” Vieve asked.

“Do I!” Kit laughed. “I guess you don’t know what a dignified position
your big brother holds, my child. Why, I eat in the cabin, with silver
forks and spoons, and a monogram on all the dishes. And in the evening
I sit at the Captain’s desk and do my writing.”

“Oh, Kit!” Mrs. Silburn expostulated. She was not quite sure whether he
was joking with them or not.

“It’s a fact,” he answered, laughing to think how grand he could make
everything appear if he felt inclined to boast. “And I wash the dishes
afterwards, and clean the spoons; but that part we don’t speak of in
polite society.”

They were done eating, but still busy talking, when Vieve suddenly
asked:--

“What’s in that barrel, Kit?”

“Ah, Miss Curiosity!” he laughed. “You’re the same old Vieve, ain’t
you? I suppose that’s the way your relation Eve prodded poor Adam on to
his ruin. But to tell you the truth, Vieve, I don’t exactly know what’s
in it myself. Suppose I bring it in and we find out.”

No sooner said than done; the barrel was rolled in, and Vieve had the
hammer and chisel ready.

“Now shut all the doors, Vieve,” he said, as he unfastened the head;
“if it should be anything alive, it might get away.”

Vieve hastened to obey, but seeing him laughing at her, she threw them
open again.

When the head was raised from the barrel, the room was instantly filled
with a delightful tropical aroma that was familiar enough to Kit, but
that is seldom found in a house in Huntington.

“Just crush these in your hands, and then smell them,” he said to both,
taking up a handful of the fragrant lemon leaves with which the top
of the barrel was covered; and they thought they had never smelled
anything so sweet.

When he brushed the leaves aside, he found more than half a bushel
of lemons, limes, and oranges. Then a little partition nailed in,
and beneath it a great assortment of southern fruits--sugar apples,
loquats, sapadillos, sour sops, jelly cocoanuts, tamarinds, guavas,
and bananas. Then another partition, and beneath that a dozen of the
largest and finest pineapples he had ever seen. By the time the barrel
was emptied, every table and chair in the kitchen was covered with
luscious fruit.

“Where in the world did you get all these things, Kit?” his mother
asked.

“A present from one of my friends in Yucatan,” he replied; and then he
had to tell all about Mr. Ysnard and how kind he had been. While he
talked he was busy gathering up the fruit and laying it on the pantry
shelves, where it would neither freeze nor be too warm, and Vieve and
her mother fell to and washed the dishes.

“We’ll try one of these pineapples in the sitting-room,” he said; and
he took a sharp knife and began to pare off the rough outer skin. “I
want you to taste a real pine fresh from the orchard. They’re very
different from the hard little things we buy here.” When it was peeled
he took two forks and tore it apart into small pieces, as he had been
taught on the ship; and around the sitting-room stove they were all
agreed that no better or sweeter fruit could be grown.

But alas for Kit’s intentions to tell all his adventures that evening!
He had had little sleep on the tug, and before the pineapple was
finished, he caught himself nodding several times.

“There’s no use talking,” he laughed; “I’ve got to go to bed. The
wonderful adventures and hairbreadth escapes of Christopher Silburn,
Esq., will keep for another time. I guess I’m in a hurry to feel my old
bed.”

And before many minutes he was sound asleep in it, to know no more of
ships, or tropics, or home, till he sprang up in the morning, thinking
that he must hurry to clean the cabin.

Breakfast was hardly over before Harry Leonard, one of Kit’s old chums,
called to see him; for by that time it was known all over Huntington
that Kit was home. Harry was a good companion in every respect but one:
the boys called him the biggest boaster in Fairfield County.

“I’m thinking of going to sea myself,” he said, after they had talked
a few minutes. “I know where I can get a berth as second mate of a
bark, after I’ve made a voyage or two. What do you do on the _North
Cape_, Kit?”

“I’m assistant to the Captain,” Kit answered, with a sly wink at Vieve;
“I write out the manifests and such things. He and I were the only ones
who went ashore, and I spent several days with our agent in Sisal. I
want you to try an orange out of the barrel of fruit the agent sent out
to the ship for me. Oh, yes, I have to be back in five days more. I
don’t know who’d make out all the papers if I didn’t get there.”

With Vieve hiding her face and shaking, it was hard for Kit to keep
from laughing, but he did.

“Didn’t I give him a dose?” he roared, after Harry was gone. “He’s such
an awful bragger I thought I’d pay him in his own coin. But isn’t it
funny how you can change things by telling only one side of a story.
Everything I said was true, only I didn’t tell it all.”

That afternoon Kit was out in the snow with a ladder and hammer and
nails, fastening the end of the cornice that was loose; and before dark
he had mended the shaky front gate, and replaced some missing pickets,
and put a new hinge on the kitchen door.

“I’m not going to let you work so when you come home for a little
holiday, Kit,” his mother said in the evening when they were sitting
around the fire again. “You must rest.”

“Oh, that’s nothing at all,” Kit retorted. “I want the place to look
shipshape for a particular reason. Somebody may be coming home one
of these days, and he must find everything in good order. I know you
don’t like to talk about that, mother, but it has to be talked about
sometimes. As long as there is the least chance, we must not lose
hope; and both Captain Griffith and Mr. Ysnard think there is still
a possibility of father’s being alive. Of course it is a very slight
chance, but still it is a chance, and we must not give up.”

“Oh, Kit, I am so glad to hear you say so!” Vieve exclaimed. “You know
that’s what I have always said. And your Captain thinks so too!”

“Ah, don’t deceive yourselves, children,” Mrs. Silburn sighed. “How
could your father be alive without coming home or even sending us word
for nearly a year? And we know that his ship was lost.”

“Yes, there is no doubt his ship was lost, mother,” Kit admitted, “but
still there are many things that may have happened through which he may
be alive and yet not be able to get home, or even to write to us. Mr.
Ysnard has a friend whose ship was lost at sea, but who got home more
than two years after he had been given up. They took to the boats, of
course, and all the boats were swamped but the one he was in. That one
was picked up by a Norwegian brig bound for Honolulu. When they got
into the Pacific, after going around Cape Horn, the brig was wrecked
also, and the crew got to one of the little desert islands in the
Pacific where ships never touch. They were there over a year before
they got away. And there was an ending to that that won’t be likely to
happen in our case. When the man got home, he found his ‘widow’ just
about to be married to some other man.”

“No, I don’t think that will happen in our case!” Mrs. Silburn said,
smiling in spite of herself. “Such remarkable escapes happen sometimes
at sea, but we have no right to expect them. You may as well make up
your mind that you will have to be the head of the family, Kit.”

“A poor head at present, I am afraid,” Kit answered. “But I think the
day will come when I shall be able to take care of you both, if father
doesn’t come back. That’s what I am planning for, at any rate. It’s not
much of a position to be a cabin boy, but I expect to have a better one
some day. It sha’n’t be my fault if I don’t. If I can show them that I
am fit for a better place, I think I will get it in time. But even now
I can do a little bit toward helping things along; I nearly forgot that
part of the business.”

He put his hand in his pocket and took out some money, and laid a
bright new two-dollar note in Genevieve’s lap.

“You know the dollar’s worth of stamps you sent me, Vieve. I was
awfully glad to get them, too, for I felt pretty poor just then. So
there’s the dollar, with a little interest added.”

He had not the heart to tell her that he had been robbed of the stamps.
In all his accounts of his adventures he had not said a word about the
hardships he had gone through. When he told about how nearly he had
been arrested, it was only to turn it into a joke.

“No, I don’t want it, Kit,” Vieve protested, trying to hand him back
the note. “I sent you that for a present.”

“No back talk to the head of the family, miss!” he laughed, giving
his sister’s wavy hair a playful pull. “And here’s a little for you,
mother. I can leave you only three dollars this time, as it will cost
me a dollar to get back to the ship. But I hope before long to do
better than that. If I could only make a little more money, I’d like to
have some paint put on the house.”

“I’m not going to touch a cent of it,” Mrs. Silburn declared. “I don’t
need it, but you do. I want you to buy a cheap overcoat with that
money; you can’t be going about in winter without an overcoat.”

“I don’t need one,” Kit protested. “I tried on my old one up in my room
this morning, and it fits first rate. It’s plenty good enough till I
get in with the ‘Four Hundred’ in New York, and none of the Vanderbilts
or Astors have invited me to dinner so far. But I don’t need an
overcoat at all unless we go to some cold country next voyage.”

“And where do you expect to go next time?” Vieve interrupted.

“There’s no telling,” Kit answered; “it just depends upon who charters
the ship. We might go to China, or to Australia, or Bombay, or most any
seaport in the world. Maybe it will be back to Sisal, for all I know.
Even the Captain did not know, when I left.”

Kit had his own way about the money in the end, and made his mother
accept the three dollars.

“I’d be a nice head of a family if I couldn’t leave you any money!”
he argued. “You know I have no expenses like other fellows; and if
I should need money at any time I could draw against my wages. The
sailors nearly all do that; indeed, they have generally spent their
pay for the voyage before they start, so they have to work to pay the
bill.”

He was acting very much like the head of the family when he looked over
the old house one morning and announced that he thought it could be
made very comfortable for them as soon as he had more money.

“I like the arrangement of it,” he said; “this sitting-room in front
with the kitchen behind it is very handy. Then the parlor across the
hall and your bedroom behind that is very handy, too. When father comes
back, Vieve can take the other room upstairs.”

“Oh, it’s a shame to let you work so hard just to make us comfortable!”
Vieve exclaimed. “Other boys have such good times with their skating
and swimming and football and such things. I’m going to work myself
just as soon as I get a chance.”

“I hope you will,” Kit laughed. “Go to school and work there just as
hard as you can. If mother hadn’t made me go to school and attend
to my lessons, I’d be just an ordinary cabin boy now. I mean,” he
explained, blushing a little at the way he had put it, “I shouldn’t be
able to copy manifests for the Captain, or do a supercargo’s work for
him on shore. We don’t see at the time how much good study does us,
but I tell you we see it afterward, Vieve. And skating and football
and such things! Pshaw, don’t you think I got enough of them when I
was at home? When a fellow gets to my age” (and he drew himself up a
little taller, which made Vieve smile), “he has other things to think
of. I want to push myself ahead, Vieve, and earn enough to take care
of you both. And swimming, did you say? Who do you think has a better
chance for swimming than a sailor when his ship is in port? Oh, you
needn’t sympathize with me, my child. I’d rather go off and see foreign
countries than play football.”

On Sunday morning he and Vieve went together to the old white church
across the broad street, “just like old times,” as they said; and after
Sunday school he had to explain to a score of friends where he had been
and what he had been doing. His boy friends, he noticed, did not seem
to think it any hardship to go to sea in a fine steamship; most of them
would have jumped at the chance to go with him.

A whole week seemed so long when he left the _North Cape_ to go
home! And it seemed so short when the last day came! But the stage was
coming down the hill, and Kit had his old overcoat on, which was a
trifle short, but very warm. And under his arm was a little bundle of
shirts and things that his mother had made for him.

“I may have a chance to get home after the next voyage,” he said, when
they were half smothering him with good-bys in the cold hall, “and I
may be gone for six months; there’s no telling. But I’ll write whenever
I can, you may be sure, and tell you where to send letters. Turk,
you’re pawing me all to pieces, old fellow. Good-by, Vieve; good-by,
mother. I’d keep father’s chair and things ready for him, if I were
you, for he might walk in most any day. Good-by, Turk. He knows I’m
going away, doesn’t he?”

In a minute more he was in the stage, his mother waving to him from the
door, Vieve throwing kisses to him from the gate, and Turk jumping in
the snow, barking furiously.

“That’s a pretty little sister you’ve got,” said Silas, when a turn in
the road hid the old house from sight.

“I’m glad you think so,” Kit laughed, “for everybody says she is the
image of me!”

He was not the first boy who has tried to laugh on leaving home, to
conceal very different feelings.

CHAPTER V.

A BURGLAR IN THE CABIN.

“Oh, this is ahead of being a cabin passenger on one of the big
liners!” Kit said to himself, as he hurried through the brick tunnel
that led to the wharf of Martin’s Stores. “The passenger knows where
he’s going, so he doesn’t have the fun of wondering. But I don’t know.
Maybe the ship has been chartered for China while I’ve been away; or it
might be for Russia, to carry grain. There’s no seaport in the world
that we mightn’t go to. I think one will suit me just about as well as
another, though I’d rather like to cross the ocean.”

Tom Haines was one of the first men he met on deck.

“Well, have you made up your mind where you’re going to take the yacht
to this voyage?” Kit asked, as they shook hands.

“Don’t call her a yacht!” Tom laughed. “We’d have too many big bills to
pay if she was our yacht. It’s better as it is: we get a salary and a
sea-voyage at the same time. Yes, we’re chartered for Nassau this trip,
to bring back pineapples and sponges; and we’ll be off in four or five
days.”

“For Nassau!” Kit repeated; “why, that’s--” but there he stopped.

“That’s right,” Tom said, still laughing. “Stick to your old rule and
never say you don’t know a thing, but go and find it out. I know what
you’re thinking about. You want to go down in the cabin and look at the
map to see where Nassau is. But I’ll save you the trouble. It’s the
capital of the Bahama Islands, in the northern West Indies, and about
a thousand miles from New York; so that will make a short voyage. But
there’s more news for you: you have a new cabin steward.”

“No!” Kit answered, not at all sorry to hear it. “Where’s the old
steward?”

“I should think in Bellevue Hospital by this time,” Tom replied,
“unless he’s reformed. He got on a terrible spree and fell to breaking
the crockery, so the Captain sent him off in a hurry. The new man is
a Scotchman named MacNish, and that’s all I can tell you about him.
There’s a new galley boy, too; but that doesn’t count for much.”

“Not to you,” Kit declared, “but it does to me, because now I’m not the
newest hand on the ship. But I must go down and report myself.”

He did not see the new steward, who was at work in the pantry; but
Captain Griffith called him into his stateroom.

“I am glad you are back promptly,” he said, “for to-morrow we begin
taking in cargo for Nassau, and I want you to keep tally as it comes on
board. It is not exactly cabin boy’s work, but you do it carefully,
and it is good experience for you.”

“I am only too glad to do it, sir,” Kit answered. “I want to make
myself useful.”

“I thought of raising your pay two or three dollars a month for this
extra work,” the Captain went on, “but I have concluded not to do it at
present. I don’t want to make a pet of you; it’s better that you should
work your way gradually like other people. You can go to the steward
now and see whether he has anything for you to do.”

There was nothing to be done at the moment, for the new steward had
everything in order. Kit had never seen the pantry so clean, nor the
cabin brass-work so well polished. Mr. MacNish was apparently about
forty years old, a plump man of medium height, his florid round face
smooth except for a little tuft of iron-gray whiskers under each ear.

“Looks more like an Englishman than a Scotchman,” Kit said to himself;
and his accent certainly was more English than Scotch; but his manner
was much pleasanter than the other steward’s, and he used so many
biblical quotations when he talked that Kit thought he must be a very
devout man.

For the next four days the cabin boy was busy keeping tally of the
general cargo as it came aboard, and after the same performance as
before of anchoring by the Liberty statue and the Captain coming out in
a tug, the _North Cape_ got under way for Nassau. There was not
much to be seen of the New Jersey coast this time, for she stood out
to the southeastward all the first night, and in two days and a half
crossed the Gulf Stream and ran into warmer weather. And every day Kit
thought more and more of the new steward. He was so kind and gentle,
so willing to do things himself rather than give Kit trouble, so neat
and industrious, and above all so pious in his conversation, that it
worried the cabin boy to see that Captain Griffith treated him rather
abruptly, as if he did not care much for him.

“Was that a little Bible I saw you have last night, my boy?” Mr.
MacNish asked Kit one morning. “Ah, I thought so. I like to see boys
read their Bible. And maybe you’d lend it to me sometimes. Mine must
have been stolen, I’m afraid, for I always carry it in my satchel. Oh,
it’s a great comfort, lad, in times of trouble. My good old father”
(his voice grew a little husky) “taught me to read my chapter every
day, and I don’t like to miss it. I hope to see the day when we’ll have
morning and evening service on every ship afloat.”

On the sixth day after leaving New York they sighted Nassau, and Kit
was delighted with the appearance of the place from the water. The big
square stone houses, with their upper and lower balconies enclosed with
green Venetian blinds; the red tiled roofs, white streets running up a
steep hill, palm trees waving gracefully over many of the roofs, old
forts, half in ruins, to the right and left of the town, and the warm
summer weather in midwinter, made it seem like a little fairy-land.
But these things had to be seen from a distance, for the _North
Cape_ drew too much water to cross the bar. She anchored outside,
half a mile from the town, close under the long narrow strip of rock
called Hog Island, where she was exposed to the north wind and would
have to hoist anchor and put to sea if a gale came.

By the next day the lighters were ready, for the cargo had to be landed
in lighters as it had been in Sisal, though the distance was not as
great, and Kit was set ashore early to check off every package as it
was put on the wharf. He was no beginner at this work now, and as the
people spoke English he found it much easier than at Sisal, though the
boatmen and ’longshoremen were all negroes, and spoke a mixed jargon of
Congo African and Colonial English that was sometimes almost as hard
to understand as the Spanish. The day was intensely hot, and there was
no tree or building on the wharf to give him shelter, and the lighters
arrived so fast that he not only had no chance to see anything of the
city, but had not even time to stop for dinner.

The only break in the long day was when the mail steamer, the
_Santiago_, arrived from New York. She also was too large to cross
the bar, and a little tug went out to her and carried her passengers
and mails ashore.

When the day’s work was over, Kit was quite ready to return to the ship
and eat his supper; but while they were washing dishes the steward
proposed that they should get permission and spend the evening on
shore.

“I feel so lost without the Holy Scriptures I brought from home,” he
said, “and the precious hymn book I used when I was younger than you
are. Ah, how many times they have made my heart light when it was sore
with trouble. I can buy new ones on shore, but they’ll not be like the
ones I used so long. And I want to mail a letter to my dear old father.
I think the Captain would let us go if you were to ask him.”

Kit was rapidly gaining experience of the world, but he still had a
great deal to learn about the people who live in it. That there are men
who try to hide their wickedness under a cloak of deep piety he had no
suspicion. It was very nice in the new steward, he thought, to take the
first opportunity to replace his lost Bible and mail a letter to his
aged father; and though he felt more like going to bed, he went to the
Captain and readily got permission for them both to go ashore, without
the least suspicion that the steward would much have preferred to go
alone, but was using him as a cat’s-paw because the Captain would be
more likely to oblige him.

They were taken to the landing-steps in the gig, with the understanding
that the boat would return for them at half-past ten, Mr. MacNish
carrying along a small leather satchel, strongly mounted with brass,
that looked quite luxurious for the steward of a tramp steamship.

“I want to make a few trifling purchases,” he explained, “and this will
be handy to carry them aboard in. Perhaps I can’t find what I want, but
I’ll not worry over it; ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”

As they climbed up the slippery stone steps Kit noticed two men who
looked like Americans sitting on a bench in the little park, and
imagined that they looked very hard and sharp at him and his companion.
And he saw that the steward noticed them too; indeed there was little
that Mr. MacNish did not notice, now that they were ashore. He looked
around as if there might be highwaymen behind the trees, and clutched
his satchel a little tighter, though it was too dark for him to see the
men distinctly.

When they crossed the small park they were in Bay Street, the main
business street of the place; and they had not gone far before they
were in front of a dingy saloon, with doors standing wide open.

“I feel the chill of the night air,” Mr. MacNish said, stopping before
the door, “and it is dangerous to be chilled in the tropics. Let us go
in and get something to warm us.”

“I am warm enough, thank you,” Kit answered; “I don’t care for
anything.”

“You know the apostle advises us to take a little wine for the
stomach’s sake,” the steward urged.

“My stomach’s all right!” Kit laughed. “I suppose they didn’t have any
quinine in those days; quinine’s much better.”

“Then hold my satchel till I come out,” the steward said, putting it in
Kit’s hands; and a minute later he stood in front of the bar, pouring
out a tumblerful of something that looked stronger than wine.

While the steward was in the saloon, the two men who had been sitting
in the park passed by on the other side of the street, and Kit noticed
again that they were looking sharply at him and at Mr. MacNish. He was
positive now that they were watched, and it startled him; but he was
relieved to see that the two men paused and exchanged a few words with
a Nassau policeman a little further up the street. They could hardly
be highwaymen, he thought, if they were known to the police. When Mr.
MacNish came out of the saloon he spoke about them.

“Two men who look like Americans seem to be taking a great interest in
us,” he said. “They watched us pretty closely when we landed, and they
just walked past here, looking at us again.”

“What’s that!” MacNish exclaimed; “two men! What did they look like?”

Kit wondered that such a trifling thing should excite him so much, but
he described the men as well as he could.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” MacNish said, though his manner belied his words.
“You just imagine it. Here, we’ll turn up this way toward the hill; I
think the stores are better in the street above. You carry the satchel
for me a bit, my lad.”

They turned into a dark side street, and were no sooner around the
corner than the steward quickened the pace almost to a run. His manner
was so changed that Kit for the first time became suspicious, and
thought that he had better have nothing to do with the satchel.

“Here, you take your satchel, Mr. MacNish,” he said; “I can keep up
with you better if I have nothing to carry. We don’t need to hurry so
much, do we?”

MacNish snatched the satchel from his hands without replying, and
before they had taken ten steps more Kit was almost knocked down by two
men who sprang out from an alley and seized the steward by both arms
as if they were used to such work. By the dim light from a neighboring
shop window Kit saw that they were the men who had been in the park.

“Now, then, Slippery Jim, we want you,” one of the men said. “No
nonsense, unless you want some lead in you.”

Kit was too much astonished to speak, but the steward was equal to the
emergency. With a powerful jerk he wrenched himself free, and the next
moment Kit saw the gleam of a revolver in his hand and heard a shot
fired. It was done so quickly, however, that the bullet flew wide; and
the next minute two policemen in uniform emerged from the alley, and
all four men grappled with the desperate steward and bore him down.

His language as he lay struggling on his back on the sidewalk was
anything but pious; but he submitted to the inevitable when the
officers put handcuffs on his wrists and stood him on his feet.

“I am afraid you have made a mistake, gentlemen,” Kit at length said;
“this man is Mr. MacNish, steward of the steamship _North Cape_.”

“Steward nothing!” one of the men answered, contemptuously. “This man
is Slippery Jim, with fifty other names, and one of the slickest bank
burglars in the world. He’s the man that tapped the North Western bank
for a hundred and forty thousand dollars ten days ago, and I only hope
he’s got it in that satchel. Steward, indeed! He’s smart enough to turn
his hand to anything, and he took that way to escape from New York with
his booty. See here.”

As he spoke the man took hold of the whiskers on both sides of
MacNish’s face, and being false ones they came off very easily. Then he
rubbed his handkerchief across the steward’s face, and wiped off a big
patch of the pink stain that had given him a florid appearance.

“We got on his track just after you sailed,” the man continued, “and
followed him in the mail steamer. We are detectives from New York, and
you are a lucky boy that we don’t take you in as an accomplice.”

Meanwhile the other stranger had been trying to open the satchel.
Finding it securely locked, he impatiently took his knife and cut a
long slit in the leather and thrust in his hand.

“Here we have it!” he exclaimed, “or some of it. We’ll count it over at
the police station.”

Kit’s eyes bulged when he saw a big handful of greenbacks and bonds
taken from the satchel; not covetously, but in awe when he thought of
the great amount of stolen money he had been carrying.

The steward, seeing that his game had reached an end, was inclined to
laugh over his experiences on the _North Cape_.

“You’ll be wanting a new steward on the ship, Spooney,” he laughed,
“for I’ve accepted a steady situation on shore. I hope you’ll lend
your Bible to the next man; I found it awfully comforting. But I guess
I’ll not mail that letter to-night to my dear old papa; the old chap
was hanged about thirty years ago. I kept your blooming cabin in good
shape, anyhow, for a man with a hundred and forty thousand dollars in
his satchel.”

It was a relief to Kit when the officers took his former companion
away. He had heard of such desperate criminals, but had never been face
to face with one before. He had an hour yet before the boat would come,
and spent the time walking the streets, feeling sick at heart and a
little out of patience with himself.

“I don’t wonder he called me ‘Spooney,’” he reflected. “I ought to
have been smart enough to see through the man at once, as I think the
Captain did, to some extent. How easily he might have got me into a
heap of trouble if it had been worth his while! Even a poor boy with
nothing to be robbed of, has to be careful whom he associates with. So
remember that in the future, Mr. Kit Silburn!”

The Captain’s only remark, when he returned to the ship and told what
had happened, put Kit in a little better spirits.

“So that leaves us without a cabin steward,” the Captain said, “in a
small port where we can’t get another. I wish I could cut you right
straight in two, Christopher, for I want you in two places at once. As
soon as we have the cargo out you must act as steward till we get back
to New York; but for the present I must have you on shore.”

“I think I can manage with the steward’s work, sir,” Kit answered; “and
the cargo ought to be out in two or three days now.”

“And till then the engineers’ boy must look after the cabin too,” the
Captain added.

That night Kit had many things to think of as he lay in his berth.
Everybody feels a little sheepish to be so thoroughly deceived, and
he was no exception. But there were more important things to consider
than that. It was only a wretched burglar who had called him a spooney,
and his employer liked him well enough to want him in two places at
once. Kit was a good fellow, but he was human, like the rest of us, and
that remark of the Captain’s made him feel pretty well satisfied with
himself. And here was the steward’s place vacant. If he did good work
there for a week or two, he could get the place permanently, he felt
almost sure of that. But did he want it? He was not quite sure about
that. On the one hand it would bring him better pay, and on the other
hand if he became a steward he probably would never get any higher. And
after all, maybe the Captain would think him too young; and a dozen
more ifs and ands, and in the midst of it all he fell asleep.

For the next week he was the busiest boy in the Bahama Islands. As far
as possible he set things right for the day in the cabin before he went
ashore, then stood all day in the sun, checking off cargo, and was back
to the ship again in time to attend to supper. In the evening he washed
the dishes and cleaned up the pantry, and turned in early because he
had to turn out early. In those days it was only by good management
that he could get ten minutes of his own to write a short letter home.

“Well, you _are_ a softy!” Chock Cheevers said to him one morning
in the cabin--for it was Chock who had to wait on the Captain in Kit’s
absence. “Here you’re doing the steward’s work, and the cabin boy’s,
and the supercargo’s, all for six dollars a month. I’d strike for
double pay, anyhow, if I was you. I’m going to strike, myself, pretty
soon if this double work keeps on.”

“My child,” Kit laughed (he hardly noticed it himself, but he always
spoke to the mess-room boy now as if he were indeed the supercargo,
instead of only the cabin boy), “if I had time I would tell you how
many millions strikes cost every year without doing any good, for I
read it one day in an old newspaper. But I haven’t time; the boat is
waiting for me. You do the striking, and I’ll do the working. The
fellows who work don’t generally need to strike. Besides, I like to do
it.”

That evening Captain Griffith called Kit into his stateroom when his
work in the pantry was done.

“I want you to make me out a complete list of everything that has been
landed so far,” he said, “so that the agent ashore can receipt for the
goods. I suppose you see by this time something of what a supercargo’s
work is on board ship.”

“Yes, sir,” Kit answered; “he has to see that the whole cargo is taken
out and landed, and receipted for by the agent.”

“Yes, that and much more,” the Captain continued. “He is the agent on
board of the parties that charter the ship, and must look after their
interests in every way. He is not an employee of the ship, but of the
charterers. Suppose the _North Cape_ is chartered by John Smith &
Co. to carry a cargo to Rio Janeiro. They deliver their goods on the
wharf, and we load them and carry them to Rio, but beyond loading,
carrying, and unloading them, we legally have nothing to do with them.
It is the supercargo’s business to tally the goods delivered on the
wharf and put on board, see them safely landed at their destination,
and take the consignee’s receipt for them. But more than that, he
must take care of the cargo on the voyage. If there is live stock, he
sees that it is fed and cared for. If there are fruits or vegetables,
he takes care that they are kept cool in hot climates, and kept
from freezing in northern latitudes. In short,” he concluded, “the
supercargo must take as great care of the cargo as if it belonged to
him, always under the owners’ orders. And he is a passenger on the
ship, living in the cabin with the captain, and having nothing to
do, of course, with the management of the vessel. There are always
two interests on a chartered ship,--the interest of the ship, which
the captain takes care of, and the interest of the cargo, which is
the supercargo’s work. Unfortunately we have had only small charters
lately, that did not warrant the employment of a supercargo, so his
work has been left for me to do. When we are chartered for large and
valuable cargoes, the charterers always put a supercargo on board.”

Kit’s work on shore did not end when the small general cargo was
discharged, as he expected. Nassau business men have an easy way of
thinking that things can be done just as well to-morrow as to-day;
and when the _North Cape_ was empty her return cargo of sponges
and pineapples was not ready. He had to make frequent visits to Mr.
Johnson, the pineapple man, and Mr. Sawyer, the sponge man, to hurry
them up.

“I am just going out to the pine fields now,” Mr. Johnson said when
Kit first visited him; “come along, and see for yourself how things
are.”

Kit climbed into the carriage with him, and they drove out about two
miles back of the city to the nearest fields, where he saw for the
first time how pineapples grow. The field was a large one of twenty or
thirty acres, very rocky, but with soil between the protruding rocks
that was almost as red as bricks, and covered with plants from three to
four feet high, each plant with many long, narrow, stiff “leaves,” and
each leaf sharp with spines along its sides and a needle-like point.
The score of colored men who were cutting the pines all wore leather
leggings, he noticed, to protect them from the sharp points.

“And only one pineapple to a plant!” Kit exclaimed; “I thought they
would bear more than that.”

“Only one,” Mr. Johnson laughed. “The pine is a very large fruit to
grow on so small a plant, and each plant produces only one. When it is
ripe, we cut it, and that plant’s usefulness is over, except that it
sends out a great many little shoots, called slips, which we take up
and plant for next year’s crop. You see the pine grows on a long stalk
in the middle of the plant, and shoots up like a big cabbage head out
of a bush.”

With the promise of enough pines to begin loading next day, Kit went
to Mr. Sawyer’s sponge yard to hurry matters there, and was told that
Mr. Sawyer was at the Sponge Exchange; and through going there to find
him he learned enough about sponges to make him open his eyes wide.
The Exchange was a large stone building on one of the wharves, with a
series of broad open arches on each side, so that it seemed to have no
walls; and its concrete floor was covered with separate heaps of sponge.

“This is the most important industry we have in Nassau,” Mr. Sawyer
explained, “and this Exchange is the largest sponge market in the
world. The merchants fit out small sailboats for sponging, and the
colored men who navigate them get the sponges sometimes by diving,
sometimes by grasping them with long-handled rakes, like oyster tongs.
The sponges are cleaned with lime and sea-water, and then are brought
here and sold by auction. The members of the Exchange are so expert at
the business that for a pile of sponges worth two hundred dollars, the
bids frequently do not vary more than five or six cents. From here they
go to the sponge yard of the purchaser, where they are cleaned again
and sorted, and pressed into bales. I will go up to my yard with you
and see what the prospects are.”

The ground of the sponge yard was covered a foot deep with bits of
waste sponge, and a dozen colored men and women were sitting about with
scissors in their hands, examining the sponges, feeling them, cutting
out rough bits of stone or coral, and sometimes sewing loose ends
together to give the sponge a better shape. A rough, ragged, shapeless
sponge, after it went through these black hands, came out smooth and
shapely.

“Here is where we make the bales,” Mr. Sawyer explained, leading Kit
into a shed where a pile of sponge as big as a room was put under a
powerful press and squeezed down to the size of a cotton bale. “Sponge
is very compressible, of course. Some of these colored men take a
sponge as big as a bushel basket, and with crude levers press it into a
small cigar box. It is not only my own sponge, of course, that you are
to be loaded with; I buy wherever I can, and I think I can promise you
five hundred bales by two o’clock to begin on.”

With his mission successfully accomplished, Kit returned to the ship
and began his new duties as steward.

“Two more things to stow away in my knowledge box,” he said to himself.
“I’ve had precious little time to learn from books, but my work has
taught me some things from experience; all about Sisal hemp, to begin
with, and now about pineapples and sponges. And maybe a little about
people, too, for I’ve seen some queer ones.”

In the two weeks more that the _North Cape_ lay at Nassau, waiting
for a cargo that was made ready for her very slowly, Kit managed the
steward’s work in such a way that no complaints were made; and that he
reasonably considered a sure sign that he gave satisfaction, for the
officers of a freight ship are not slow to find fault when anything
goes wrong. While the loading was still in progress the mail steamer
returned from her visit to the south side of Cuba, and after touching
at Nassau went on to New York, carrying northward for trial and
punishment the man of many names and crimes, MacNish, the steward, who
had been lying in the Nassau prison. And when the _North Cape_
once more lay in front of Martin’s Stores, the newspapers were printing
long accounts of his attempted escape as steward of a freight steamer,
and his arrest in the West Indies.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STRANGE CASE OF JOHN DOE.

While Kit was picking his way through the pineapple fields and watching
the processes in the sponge yards of Nassau, something was happening on
the other side of the world that would have made the blood jump in his
veins if he could have known of it.

Though it was midwinter in New York, it was then, in January, midsummer
in the city of Wellington, New Zealand, which lies south of the
equator. Doors and windows stood open, and men and animals alike
sheltered themselves as far as possible from the burning rays of the
sun. Even the New Zealand boys, who are not little brown savages with
feathers in their hair, but white boys who speak English and go to
school and wear clothes made after London and Paris fashions--even the
boys found it too hot to enjoy their usual Saturday games.

On the very day that Kit was trying to hurry the pineapple men and
sponge men of Nassau, there was an unusual stir in the big public
hospital of Wellington. Not in the wards where the patients lay; no
matter what happened outside, they were always kept quiet and tranquil.
But downstairs in the Board room, where the Board of Governors of the
hospital meets four times a year to inquire into the management and
arrange the financial affairs, the windows were open and the big table
and soft armchairs all freshly dusted; and in the banqueting-hall
beyond, which the patients never see, but where the governors regale
themselves after their quarterly labors, a long table was spread as if
for a banquet.

Occasionally a carriage drove through the big gates, and one or two
gentlemen stepped out and disappeared in the house surgeon’s private
office. It was evident, to every one who knew the hospital routine,
that the quarterly meeting day had come, and that the governors were
arriving. They were to audit the accounts, to hear complaints, to make
any necessary changes in the staff, and last but by no means least to
eat the good dinner that almost invariably follows the meeting of any
board of charities.

At two o’clock precisely the chairman rapped on the big table and
called the Board to order; and the ten other gentlemen, five on each
side of the table, listened with more or less patience to the reading
of the minutes of the last meeting. Then came a batch of reports; for
the reading of reports and the appointment of committees to consider
them form a large part of the business of such meetings. The house
surgeon’s report gave a favorable account of the hospital’s work in
the last quarter. So many patients had been received, so many had been
discharged cured, and not so many but so few had died. If any stranger
had been allowed to be present, he must have thought it the most
remarkable hospital in the world. In the surgical ward, particularly,
not a single patient had died while undergoing an operation; every
operation had been successful. Some of the medical members of the Board
smiled faintly when they heard this, being familiar with the cheerful
medical custom of calling every operation successful when the patient
does not die on the spot; he may die that night or the next day, but
still the operation is called successful. There was a hush of interest
about the table when the clerk read:--

“The strange case of John Doe need not be further mentioned here, as
the house surgeon will ask the privilege of making a verbal report in
his case at the pleasure of the Board.”

Then followed the steward’s report, showing how many barrels of flour
and sugar and other eatables had been consumed and what they had cost;
and the apothecary’s report of the medicines used, and a dozen more;
and, after a half-hour’s discussion of these matters, that part of the
business was finished, and the chairman announced that he was “now
ready to hear the house surgeon’s report on what has appropriately been
called the strange case of John Doe.”

At this the house surgeon stepped forward with a small memorandum-book
open in his hand. He was a tall, slender man with iron-gray hair and
an extremely professional appearance, slow and accurate in his speech.

“Although this case has already been brought to the attention of the
Board, Mr. Chairman,” he began, “I will briefly rehearse the principal
facts for your further information. This man to whom we have given
the name of John Doe, because his real name is totally unknown to us,
was brought to this port six months ago by the British ship _Prince
Albert_; and being both physically and mentally incapacitated, he
was immediately brought to the hospital. The log of the _Prince
Albert_ showed that on the 27th of last June their lookout saw
a signal of distress flying from a pole on a small unnamed and
uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, the latitude and longitude of
which I have a minute of, but do not at the moment remember. The ship
was immediately put about and a boat lowered, and sent ashore under
command of the second mate. The mate found what he at first supposed to
be the dead bodies of four men, all scantily clothed; but on examining
the bodies faint signs of life were found in one, the man whom we now
know as John Doe, who wore nothing whatever but a pair of trousers,
and, like the others, was much emaciated. The only property found
on the island was the small spar which had been set up for a signal
pole; and the plain inference was that the four men had escaped from
some wreck on the spar, without an opportunity to save any of their
property.

“The three men who were certainly dead were decently buried, and John
Doe, who was unable to speak or even to open his eyes, was taken
on board the _Prince Albert_, where under kind and judicious
treatment he improved so far physically that by the time she reached