der I got. Despite his
former protestations of fair play, I now began to nurse a suspicion of
this befousled little gimcrack; but I'd not thought that Tommy would
grow a distemper of any magnitude until the professor, rubbing his
hands, announced:

"_Mon Capitaine_ says we do not sail for an hour. Let us take a small
boat and fish around the mangroves! Maybe a snapper, eh?--or a
sheep's-head!"

I was silent. Tommy puffed indifferently at his pipe.

"Come," he cried again. "Let us make a fishing party!"

"The trouble with fishing parties is," Tommy drawled, "that there's
always some damn fool along who wants to fish."--Which was, I think, not
only the best thing Tommy ever said but, in the circumstances, the best
that could have been said.

The professor sat down again rather suddenly and blinked at us.

"So! Then we do not fish," he murmured, and after another thoughtful
pause went below.

"I don't suppose we ought to insult him," I suggested, not intending any
one to think I meant it.

"I don't care what we do to him," Tommy savagely retorted. "All the good
you've got out of this cruise will go to the bow-wows. I won't have it,
I tell you! Let's chuck him overboard!"

"Chuck over your grouch," I laughed, although his proposition interested
me.

"Oh, I haven't any grouch," he turned away; but swung back, asking: "Are
you going to give up?"

"Most certainly not!"

"Then why don't you get busy?"

"Get busy! D'you expect me to go downstairs and drag her out of her
room?"

"Yes--do anything! She isn't staying there from choice!" (But I knew
better than that.) "If I slug the gezabo you might ask her up. Shall I?"

"Show an idea, man! You know she wouldn't see me!"

"What if she wouldn't! Bring her out, anyhow! Good Lord, Jack, if you're
an example of lovers up North, then I say God pity Yankee girls!"

"Well, what would you do, Mr. Know-so-much?" I asked, my temper blowing
up. "If she told you she'd stayed awake nights fighting it out and
reached the conclusion, absolutely and without peradventure of changing
her mind, that her destiny's in Azuria, what would you do then--you who
know such a hell of a lot about women?" I just had to say that; it kept
irritating me.

"I don't claim any knowledge of the genus," he said, looking mildly at
the horizon--and wanting to laugh, I thought. "But a modicum of brain
would show you she hasn't thought it out, at all. How could she in
forty-eight hours, being confr