It was from Sheila Murray, as he had thought, and read:
Dear Tod:
Just a line to wish you the best of luck upon your trip. Mr. Swickard left last night for New York, supposedly; but the rumour has leaked out that he is going to France. Can Neil, in truth, be there?
Are you making friends with Mr. Hawkes, the First Mate? He was on the Panama with Neil, you know. Find out all you can from him. I won't try to give you advice; you know what we want—you and I.
Ever your friend,
Sheila Murray.
Tod reread the letter twice, then entered the galley to wash the dishes in the trough. Somehow, those written words seemed to keep him in touch with friends. Without his brother, he was alone, and now he knew that Sheila loved his brother, too. He leaned against the galley doorway. The cook had disappeared into his narrow cabin across the alleyway.
Suddenly shouts struck his ears. He listened. It was the captain's voice. "Let go aft!"
Tod's heart jumped. He dropped the dish rag into the trough and ran to the forward deck. The Araby was slipping away from her moorings.
CHAPTER V
OUTWARD BOUND
LET go for'rd, Mr. Hawkes," called Captain Ramsey from the bridge.
On the forecastle head, the chief mate lifted his hand in acknowledgment of the order. At once the single dock-line slackened; the capstan whirled; the longshoremen on the pier lifted the line off the bollard, and the capstan drum began to wind in the hawser through the chock.
Tod, leaning over the forward rail, suddenly felt the ship tremble under the first thresh of the propeller. She was slipping astern, out of the dock to the bay. A deafening blast from her whistle sent up a cloud of steam to mingle with the black smoke from her funnel; the bay craft were warned that the freighter Araby was leaving her slip.
Tod glanced up at the bridge where the bar pilot stood by the rail stanchions, Captain Ramsey on his right. The boy heard the pilot's hoarse voice as he gave his orders. Near him he saw the young third mate standing at the engine-room telegraph, calmly moving the indicator at each command. In the wheel house the quartermaster stood at the helm.
The little freighter backed slowly out into the bay, stopped, and swung ahead, her bows pointed toward the Golden Gate. Against the gray sky overhead, the gulls screamed and wheeled. A breath of moisture-laden air struck Tod's cheek. On the port beam, the docks slipped past; for a moment Fishermen's Wharf, with its lateen-rigged sloops, lay like a bit of Italy at the foot of Russian Hill; then it was gone, and Fort Mason took its place. Alcatraz Island was left behind; ahead lay the Golden Gate.
The grizzled boatswain, now that the decks were cleared, the derrick booms lashed, and the hatches battened down, crossed to the rail at the boy's right hand; his gaze drifted toward the black sky outside the headlands. "The barometer's falling. Dirty weather ahead," he announced. "February's a bad month for a passage south."
Tod's eyes glowed with expectation. "Think we'll hit a storm?" he asked, eagerness in his voice.
"Running right into one," returned the boatswain calmly. "Just wait." With this parting shot he passed forward to the hatch, inspected its canvas covering, and disappeared into the seamen's forecastle.
Tod stood a moment, pondering. Neil's first ship had hit a rock outside the Columbia River bar, and his brother's story, told with flashes of colour, had ever remained in the boy's memory as an experience intense and thrilling, one to be treasured always as something infinitely precious. Now the Araby was ploughing ahead into a storm. This was life—this was living!
Rousing himself from his meditation, he returned by way of the port alleyway to the galley. A door opposite was open, and Tod saw the cook's great body lying inert upon his bunk.
"Peel the spuds," he grunted, as he looked up from a book upon which Tod saw the word "Astronomy."
Tod washed a few pots in the trough, and taking a basket, filled it with potatoes from the locker. Then he seated himself upon a stool and began running his knife round a potato. Through the porthole he saw headlands slipping by. He could feel the pulse of the engines.
"It's great to be at sea," Tod hazarded. "It's wonderful, isn't it, Mr. Jarvis?"
"Huh!" grunted the Tattooed Man from his berth. "Just you wait, kid. You'll see. Wonderful? Sufferin' catfish!"
Tod rose and renewed the fire in the range. The galley was hot; he wiped the sweat from his forehead. The ship began to roll as she met the swells coming in from sea.
He felt he must have a breath of air. He went on deck. They had passed through the Gate, and the ship lay quiet on the bosom of the ocean. The Araby, safely across the bar, was dropping her pilot. Tod watched him descend the accommodation ladder to a waiting skiff, which was rowed by two seamen to the pilot schooner standing off to port. From the deck, the pilot raised his hand in a farewell salutation; the schooner's auxiliary engines drove her nose through the waves toward a cargo liner approaching harbour.
Tod climbed the ladder to the forecastle head. Stepping over the chain cables, he passed round the windlass and leaned over the rail.
The blood seemed to sing through his veins with the rhythm of the ship's vibration. At sea! By golly, he was at sea. On the Pacific in the freighter Araby. And Panama the first landfall.
The potatoes in the galley forgotten, Tod stared about him in ecstasy. On the port beam, the land was a dark smudge against a threatening sky. A wind had set in from the southwest and increased in violence with every turn of the ship's propeller. The Araby, rising and falling as she plunged on through the heavy swells, headed south toward warmer climes. To starboard the red-hulled lightship lifted and fell astern. Ahead lay a vast expanse of heaving ocean, with the wind beating the dark green waves into white caps. To Tod's ears came the mutter of seamen in the forecastle, and the monotonous swish of the water about the steamer's bows. In the slip at San Francisco, the three-thousand-ton freighter had appeared, to his unaccustomed eyes, a veritable leviathan of the deep; here on the lonely sea she was no more than a toy boat adrift on a vast immensity.
"Where's that kid?"
Tod looked aft in terror. He had forgotten the potatoes. And dinner was not far off. Conscious that the ship was beginning to roll as well as to plunge, he swung down the companion rail to the deck. The giant cook was standing in the port alleyway, his face contorted into an angry grimace. Tod felt his way along the bulwarks. His head felt slightly dizzy; sweat lay damp on his brow. It was almost chill here in the wind; then why the strange warmth in his face, that parched feeling in his mouth? The sense of ecstasy left him.
"Run away, did yer?" shouted the cook. "Yeh, that's a blasted queer way to begin a passage. Git busy I See?"
Tod swallowed. His stomach felt as if it were whirling around. "I forgot," he began. "I'll—"
"Forgot!" bellowed the Tattooed Man. "I'll teach yuh not to forget." He stretched forth an arm in a furious gesture of rage.
Tod slid past him down the alleyway to the galley.
"Ten minutes yer got to finish in. See?" went on the cook from the doorway behind him. "Just fer that you can wash every blamed pan to-day!"
"I'll be glad to," Tod said in a conciliating tone. But as his mind turned to thoughts of the greasy water in the trough his hand went to his head in sudden horror.