Little Miss Grouch | Page 4

going to cry," said the young lady, with conviction, "all the way over."
"You'll be a cheerful little shipmate!"
"Don't you concern yourself about that," she retorted. "After the pilot leaves, you needn't have me on your mind at all."
"Thank you. Well, suppose you join me over in yonder secluded corner of the deck in about two hours. Is there anybody on board that knows you?"
"How do I know? There might be."
"Then stay out of the way, and keep muffled up as you are now. Your own mother wouldn't recognize you through that veil. In fact I don't suppose I'd know you myself, but for your voice."
"Oh, I don't always whisper. But if I try to talk out loud my throat gets funny and I want to c-c-cry--"
"Quit it! Stop. Brace up, now. We'll bluff the thing through somehow. Just leave it to me and don't worry."
"And now," queried the Tyro of himself, as he watched the forlorn little figure out of sight, "what have I let myself in for this time?"
With a view to gathering information about the functions, habits, and capacities of a pilot-boat, he started down to the office and was seized upon the companionway by a grizzled and sunbaked man of fifty who greeted him joyously.
"Sandy! Is it yourself? Well met to you!"
"Hello, Dr. Alderson," returned the young man with warmth. "Going over? What luck for me!"
"Why? Need a chaperon?"
"A cicerone, anyway. It's my first trip, and I don't know a soul aboard."
"Oh, you'll know plenty before we're over. A maiden voyager is a sort of pet aboard ship, particularly if he's an unattached youth. My first was thirty years ago. This is my twenty-seventh."
"You must know all about ships, then. Tell me about the pilot."
"What about him? He's usually a gay old salt who hasn't been out of sight of land for--"
"That isn't what I want to know. Does he take people back with him?"
"Hello! What's this? Don't want to back out already, do you?"
"No. It isn't I."
"Somebody want to go back? That's easily arranged."
"No. They don't want to go back. Not if they can help it. But could word be got to the pilot to take any one off?"
"Oh, yes. If it were sent in time. A telegram to Quarantine would get him, up to an hour or so after we cast off. What's the mystery, Sandy?"
"Tell you later. Thanks, ever so much."
"I'll have you put at my table," called the other after him, as he descended the broad companionway.
So the pilot-boat scheme was feasible, then. If the unknown weeper's father had prompt notice--from the disciple of Terpsichore, for example--he might get word to the pilot and institute a search. Meditating upon the appearance and behavior of the dock-dancer, the Tyro decided that he'd go to any lengths to see the thing through just for the pleasure of frustrating him.
"Though what on earth he wants to marry her for, I don't see," he thought. "She ought to marry an undertaker."
And he sat down to write his mother a pilot-boat letter, assuring her that he had thus far survived the perils of the deep and had already found a job as knight-errant to the homeliest and most lugubrious girl on the seven seas. At the warning call for the closing of the mails he hastened to the rendezvous on deck. She was there before him, still muffled up, still swollen of feature, and still, as he indignantly put it to himself, "blubbering."
Meantime there had reached the giant ship Clan Macgregor a message signed by a name of such power that the whole structure officially thrilled to it from top to bottom. The owner of the name demanded the instant return, intact and in good order, C.O.D., of a valuable daughter, preferably by pilot-boat, but, if necessary, by running the ship aground and sending said daughter ashore in a breeches-buoy, or by turning back and putting into dock again. In this assumption there was perhaps some hyperbole. But it was obvious from the stir of officialdom that the signer of the demand wanted his daughter very much and was accustomed to having his wants respectfully carried out. One feature of the message would have convinced the Tyro, had he seen it, of the fatuity of fatherhood. It described the fugitive as "very pretty."
The search was thorough, rigid, and quite unavailing. The reason why it was unavailing was this: At the moment when that portion of the chase to which the promenade deck was apportioned, consisting of the second officer, the purser, and two stewards, approached the secluded nook where the Tyro stood guardian above the feminine Fount of Tears, they beheld and heard only a young man admonishing a stricken girl in unmistakably fraternal terms:
"Now, Amy, you might just as well stop that sniveling. [The Tyro was taking