But she could look down upon him.  She saw him standing there so firmly—­so determinedly.  His was no nature to give over easily anything he had set his heart on.  All the more reason why Sheila should not appear to weaken.

She crouched there breathlessly as he tossed up more pebbles.  Then she heard him sigh.  Then he turned slowly away, and his feet dragged off along the path, and he went out of sight.

The girl crept back into bed.  She hid her face in the pillow and dry sobs racked her frame.  This was the hardest of all the hard things she had to do.  She had wounded Tunis to the heart!

CHAPTER XXIV

EUNEZ PARETA

Tunis Latham went down the track toward the port as the dull dawn glimmered behind him in a frame of mind so dismal and despairing that more than Sheila Macklin would have pitied the captain of the Seamew.  Against the tide of emotions which now surged in his heart he scarcely had the energy to battle.

Never had he felt less like approaching his usual tasks as commander and owner of the schooner and facing the trials he knew would meet him upon this coming trip to Boston.  Freight was waiting upon Luiz Wharf, and he would be able to pick up the remainder of his cargo at Hollis, which, with the wind as it was now, he could reach that afternoon by four o’clock.  Given good luck, he would warp into the T-wharf next day before nightfall.

The uncertain point which troubled him most was the matter of the crew of the Seamew.  The Portygees remaining with him—­even Johnny Lark, the cook—­had been in a most unhappy temper all the way back from Boston on the last trip.  Tunis could depend upon Mate Chapin, Boatswain Newbegin, and ’Rion Latham himself to stick by the schooner.  For, in spite of his quarreling and long tongue about a hoodoo, Tunis thought that his cousin was a man above any real fear of the very superstitions he talked about.

But four men could not safely work the schooner to Boston, nor in season to keep his contract with the consignees of freight which the Seamew carried.  Troubled as he had been at Boston, and delayed, Tunis wished now that he had remained there even longer while he made search for and engaged a proper crew for the schooner.  He had better, perhaps, have paid the fare of the Portygees back to Big Wreck Cove and so saved quarreling with them.

When he had been about to leave the schooner the afternoon before, the foolish fellows had sent a spokesman to him asking if he was sure the Seamew was not the old Marlin B., the Salem fishing craft which had been acclaimed “the murder ship” from the Banks to the Cape by all coasting seamen several years before.  To answer this question rasped the pride of the owner of the Seamew.  For a seaman to ask a question of one of the officers—­a question of such a nature—­was flaunting authority in any case.