“I got his telegram in San Diego four days ago, and we came over.”

“In a private car?” said Dan.  “He said ye might.”

“In a private car, of course.”

Dan looked at his father with a hurricane of irreverent winks.

“There was a tale he told us av drivin’ four little ponies in a rig av his own,” said Long Jack.  “Was that thrue now?”

“Very likely,” said Cheyne.  “Was it, Mama?”

“He had a little drag when we were in Toledo, I think,” said the mother.

Long Jack whistled.  “Oh, Disko!” said he, and that was all.

“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 crary.  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.”