Page:Barbour--For the freedom from the seas.djvu/80

 the rating of second-class seaman and with a good all-around knowledge of a seaman's duties.

As the time to report aboard the Wanderer drew near he found that, while he was impatient for duty again, existence aboard the patrol boat appealed but little to him. He set his wits to work in the endeavor to find some means of securing a transfer, but when the morning of his discharge from the hospital arrived he had failed so far to find any. The Wanderer was at Buzzard's Bay and he was to go there by train, arriving at four-twenty in the afternoon. Between New Bedford and Buzzard's Bay Fate stepped in and took a hand in his affairs.

The train was a leisurely one and stopped frequently. Nelson, hunched in the window end of a red velvet seat, with his canvas bag between his feet—that bag holding nearly all his worldly possessions until such time as the slow-moving arm of the Law, set in motion by Uncle Peter, had distributed his father's estate—looked out on the pleasant vistas of villages and harbors and open water warming in the May sunlight and felt, for some reason, rather pathetic. It was what he himself would have called "a corking day," and yet the very "corkingness" of it somehow depressed him. He was so busy feeling depressed 58