Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/276

 "About the fortune of the Ingrams coming and going with the Fortune of the Indies. Jane, you certainly did start a ball rolling when you began prying into that story."

"I'm glad I did now, I think," she said. "If China was any more wild and exciting when Great-grandfather Mark had dealings with it," said Alan, "why I'm glad I didn't live a century earlier."

"Oh, I don't know," Jane said, dreamily.

She was staring out over the bund at the busy Whangpoo with its moving traffic of vessels. Was it a trick of the blinding sunset on this tangle of masts and funnels? She saw vaguely, yet clearly, too, a lofty ship that towered, all gold across the sun, above the other boats. They were setting sail aboard her. How strange! There was not a breath of wind, yet one by one they shimmered into place—inclusive of the moonsail. . . . A mail leaned at the taffrail, with his blue eyes set eastward. "Haul on the bowlin', the bowlin' haul!" She was weighing for home—to run before the trades, to fight around the Horn, to thunder up and up the long Atlantic seas till she dropped anchor in a gray harbor on a gray shore. A