Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/109

97 hand tried to grasp the long neck, but it bobbed out of reach. Above him, a girl, Cooks-touring the Indies, called:

"Sort of a message from home."

He heard her, and their mingling laughter came through the porthole, his with the mellow gold of the negro, hers all staccato and silver.

Then the currents swept the bottle through the straits of the Greater Antilles, until it floated with the myriad islands of seaweed on the waters of the Gulf, then swung it to the North beyond the Florida Keys.

And so the seasons passed, and many wonderful sights it could have seen, had it eyes and a soul, which it should have had with that message inside, but it was only a thing of sand and potash and lead-oxide, subject to immutable laws of wind and moon and tide, not caring at all about the loves of two mortals as frail and puny as itself.

So they came and went,—the white wings of many ships, low-waisted tramps, sullen derelicts, and once, after a storm, a raft of ship s timbers hastily lashed together, and on it a gigantic black with hollow eyes and emaciated cheeks, and around it those ever-winking fins.

Now the bottle was nosed by a school of porpoises curveting over the foam-curdled crests, their sleek sides turning to dusky rainbows in the sun. And again the twin masts of a steam-yacht pricked the horizon, then came daintily step ping over the waves. On its deck lay a great railroad king whose wallet had digested millions of securities in perfect comfort, but whose stomach could not even assimilate curds and whey.