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 There was to be no waiting for twelve dreary months.

Dave lay awake many hours that night, and, with the first streaks of dawn, crept quietly down the stairs, for he wanted to set his eyes on the Pacific Queen again. He felt an air of proprietorship in regard to the vessel. Also, he half dreaded to find she had disappeared in the night, and it was with positive relief that he saw her lying snugly tied up at her berth.

He had learned in recent months to judge the cut of a vessel, and the Pacific Queen looked a trim craft to him. She was a single-screw steel freighter that had not been launched more than three years. No mail-boat that ever tore her way out of New York seemed half so magnificent in Dave's eyes as the Pacific Queen lying at her moorings that early summer morning. There was no sign of life on board except a thin stream of smoke from the galley stack, and the boy stood feasting his eyes on his future home for a full