CHAPTER IX.

A New Plan.

Weeks had passed since the happenings told of in the previous chapter took place, and nothing of any importance had occurred.  Redfox had not again ordered Willy to climb the mast with him, and even when the ship was becalmed and lay with slackened sails on a sea smooth and clear as a looking-glass, he would not allow him to go up to the crow’s nest.

“Oh, no, no, if you were to get dizzy and fall, you’d tell that I pushed you,” he sneered at every possible opportunity.  Green he avoided as much as possible.

“The boy was perhaps mistaken, and my suspicions of the Captain and Redfox may be wholly unfounded,” thought honest Green, when week after week went by without their taking revenge on either him or Willy.  The voyage had been an extraordinarily quick and fortunate one.  The days which ships usually spend in being becalmed under the Equator the ’St. George’ spent under full sail with favoring winds.  Everything on shipboard was going very well, yet the Captain was always sullen and morose.  He and Redfox sat in the cabin and gambled and drank most of their time.  Rarely did they finish one debauch before they began on another.  Redfox seemed to exercise hypnotic power over the Captain.

Willy, the darling of the crew, at first was much grieved over his uncle’s behavior and the aversion which the first officer showed for him, but he soon became accustomed to their ways.  The companionship of Green, who initiated him into the mysteries of the compass and the practical work of steering the ship, was pleasant, and he had Peppo.  The Captain had allowed the boatswain to put up another hammock in Willy’s cabin, so that Peppo could sleep there instead of going down into the steerage.  Together the boys said their morning and evening prayers, just as they were accustomed to do in the pension in Hongkong, and slept like nabobs in their little hammocks while the ship went ploughing its way through the placid ocean.

The “St. George” was at this time in the sea between the New Britain Archipelago, as the group of islands which now goes by the name of the Bismarck Archipelago was at that time called, and the Soloman Islands.  With full sail the boat was running before a stiff northwest breeze.  The fiery tropical sun burned in the heavens, and far as the eye could reach the waters rolled in a long swell on the deep blue southern sea.  A pair of screaming sea-gulls circled round the top of the mast, the sails flapped, the rigging creaked, and the waters swished and dashed against the sides of the vessel.  Other sounds there were none.  The vessel might almost have been a phantom ship upon an enchanted sea.

Green sat near the wheel in the shade of one of the sails smoking his pipe and with difficulty keeping his eyes open sufficiently to glance at the big compass and the distant horizon occasionally.  “If our reckonings are right we shall sight the Soloman Islands now at any minute,” he said to himself, and was about to call to the man on watch in the crow’s nest to see that he was not asleep, when Willy came out from the cabin and motioned to Green that he had something important to tell him.