I wuz--I am mistook in my jedgments--worse'n the men o' Marblehead,"
said Disko, as though the words were being windlassed out of him. "I
don't mind ownin' to you, Mr. Cheyne, as I mistrusted the boy to be
crazy. He talked kinder odd about money."

"So he told me."

"Did he tell ye anything else? 'Cause I pounded him once." This with a
somewhat anxious glance at Mrs. Cheyne.

"Oh, yes," Cheyne replied. "I should say it probably did him more good
than anything else in the world."

"I jedged 'twuz necessary, er I wouldn't ha' done it. I don't want you
to think we abuse our boys any on this packet."

"I don't think you do, Mr. Troop."

Mrs. Cheyne had been looking at the faces--Disko's ivory-yellow,
hairless, iron countenance; Uncle Salters's, with its rim of
agricultural hair; Penn's bewildered simplicity; Manuel's quiet smile;
Long Jack's grin of delight, and Tom Platt's scar. Rough, by her
standards, they certainly were; but she had a mother's wits in her
eyes, and she rose with out-stretched hands.

"Oh, tell me, which is who?" said she, half sobbing. "I want to thank
you and bless you--all of you."

"Faith, that pays me a hunder time," said Long Jack.

Disko introduced them all in due form. The captain of an old-time
Chinaman could have done no better, and Mrs. Cheyne babbled
incoherently. She nearly threw herself into Manuel's arms when she
understood that he had first found Harvey.

"But how shall I leave him dreeft?" said poor Manuel. "What do you
yourself if you find him so? Eh, wha-at? We are in one good boy, and I
am ever so pleased he come to be your son."

"And he told me Dan was his partner!" she cried. Dan was already
sufficiently pink, but he turned a rich crimson when Mrs. Cheyne kissed
him on both cheeks before the assembly. Then they led her forward to
show her the foc'sle, at which she wept again, and must needs go down
to see Harvey's identical bunk, and there she found the nigger cook
cleaning up the stove, and he nodded as though she were some one he had
expected to meet for years. They tried, two at a time, to explain the
boat's daily life to her, and she sat by the pawl-post, her gloved
hands on the greasy table, laughing with trembling lips and crying with
dancing eyes.

"And who's ever to use the _We're Here_ after this?" said Long Jack to
Tom Platt. "I feel as if she'd made a cathedral av ut all."

"Cathedral!" sneered Tom Platt. "Oh, if it had bin even the Fish
C'mmission boat