Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/260

234 boy? She was pretty sick last voyage, you tells me. Better? Dot is fine. When we come again to Liverpool, if you are a goot boy, you can lay off one trip mit wages, and help her get well. Now scoo-o-t. I don't want you around. You is a tamned nuisance."

"Moses-Josephs" ducked in thanks, and the captain locked the door behind him, and sat at his desk with the "old brown wallet" before him. "I vill count him once," he confided to the barometer, "for fear he may have ewaporated while I forgot him."

His glance fell next on the picture of his wife, framed in silver against the wall. As he slowly counted the rustling notes, he talked aloud to her in German, as he had done many times in sheer loneliness and longing:

"Four hundred pounds—the first four hundred pounds came hard, my Flora, didn't it? Ten years we saved it while I was fourth and third officer in the company. One thousand pounds—we had a grand celebration when that was landed high and dry, eh? Fifteen hundred—it is