Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/121

 sailing time by three, four, five days, perhaps. She has borne away the hearts of both of us but she is a good ship and she will bring them back again."

His stout faith in his ship was matched only by Humphrey's unwavering confidence. Others might have said that this maiden voyage of his first command was a heart-breaking one, for many of his men were untrained seamen, grumbling at their narrow quarters and heavy labor, while the art of handling the new vessel was, in itself, not easy to acquire. The weather was boisterous and the winds fitful, but the West Wind did not betray the two good friends who had brought her into being. The storms lent her wings so that, at last, anxiety and discontent gave way entirely to pride in the speed that she was making. There was a certain grizzled old sailor, however, who openly discredited all claims of the ship's prowess, and who even refused to believe the evidence of the day's reckoning.

"Twenty-three days is the best she will do," he vowed over and over again. "I will stake a year's pay on it that she can't make an hour less."

Yet, on the nineteenth day of their passage, a warm, gusty afternoon of early May, when the far horizon swam in haze, it was he who came himself to the captain and broke through all etiquette to report, round-eyed with amazement—

"There's land been sighted, sir, and I don't