“Why don’t you kick to the Old Man, then?” sneered Thrackles.

The silence that followed, and the sullenness with which Perdosa readdressed himself to his work, was significant enough of Captain Selover’s past relations with the men.

And how we did clean her!  We stripped her of every stitch and sliver until she floated high, an empty hull, even her spars and running rigging ashore.  I understood now the crew’s grumbling.  We literally went at her with a nail brush.

Captain Selover took charge of us when we had reached this period.  He and the Nigger and Perdosa had long since finished the installation of the permanent camp.  They had built us huts from the wreck, collecting stateroom doors for the sides, and hatches for the roofs, huge and solid, with iron rings in them.  The bronze and iron ventilation gratings to the doors gave us glimpses of the coast through fretwork; the rich inlaying of woods surrounded us.  We set up on a solid rock the galley stove—­with its rails to hold the cooking pots from upsetting, in a sea way.  In it we burned the debris of the wreck, all sorts of wood, some sweet and aromatic and spicy as an incensed cathedral.  I have seen the Nigger boiling beans over a blaze of sandal wood fragrant as an Eastern shop.

First we scrubbed the Laughing Lass, then we painted her, and resized and tarred her standing rigging, resized and rove her running gear, slushed her masts, finally careened her and scraped and painted her below.

When we had quite finished, we had the anchor chain dealt out to us in fathoms, and scraped, pounded and polished that.  These were indeed days full of labour.

Being busy from morning until night we knew but little of what was about us.  We saw the open sea and the waves tumbling over the reef outside.  We saw the headlands, and the bow of the bay and the surf with its watching seals and the curve of yellow sands.  We saw the sweep of coast and the downs and the strange huts we had built out of departed magnificence.  And that was all; that constituted our world.

In the evening sometimes we lit a big bonfire, sailor fashion, just at the edge of the beach.  There we sat at ease and smoked our pipes in silence, too tired to talk.  Even Handy Solomon’s song was still.  Outside the circle of light were mysterious things—­strange wavings of white hands, bendings of figures, callings of voices, rustling of feet.  We knew them for the surf and the wind in the grasses:  but they were not the less mysterious for that.

Logically Captain Selover and I should have passed most of our evenings together.  As a matter of fact we so spent very few.  Early in the dusk the captain invariably rowed himself out to his beloved schooner.  What he did there I do not know.  We could see his light now in one part of her, now in the other.  The men claimed he was scrubbing her teeth.  “Old Scrubs” they called him to his back:  never Captain Selover.